Legendary Voices - Softcover

Douglas, Nigel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879101873 ISBN 13: 9780879101879

Publisher: Limelight Editions, 1995

Synopsis

An account of the lives and careers of 14 of this century's greatest classical singers.

About this title

Review:

There's a temptation to look at opera solely through the performances of our own time, and to forget the contributions of artists from an earlier era. (It can be equally tempting to conclude that great singing ended with the retirements of the singers we heard in our respective youths, but that's a different pathology.) Nigel Douglas takes an illuminating look at 14 great singers of the past, with a discussion of each, anecdotes, and compact disc recommendations.

Review:

Legendary Voices is a wonderfully readable account of the lives and careers of fourteen of this century's greatest singers, along with a critical evaluation of their recorded works, which are available for the first time on CD. Nigel Douglas (a British tenor and producer of more than two hundred programs on opera and operetta for the BBC) brings to Legendary Voices not only the unrivaled knowledge of the professional but the irrepressible enthusiast of the aficionado. From Jussi Bjoerling to Rosa Ponselle, from Ezio Pinza to Kirsten Flagstad, most of these great singers seem to have led more extraordinary lives than the glamorous characters they immortalized on the stage. Not that their beginnings were always auspicious: Caruso's singing teacher told hm his voice sounded like "the wind whistling through a window"; Lotte Lehman was expelled from music school for failure to profit from instruction. Nor were their endings always happy: Luisa Tetrazzini ("I am old, I am fat, I am ugly - but I am still Tetrazinni") died in poverty, and Fritz Wunderlich in a tragic accident at the age of thirty-five. Full of wonderful anecdotes, Legendary Voices is also a mine of information about the range and quality of the newly available CDs, a book readers will turn to for advice as well as entertainment. -- Midwest Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Limelight Editions
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0879101873
• ISBN 13: 9780879101879
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 305