John Ayre in his biography describes a stopover in Rome during Frye’s 1937 visit to Italy, including an opportunity to take in a Verdi opera:<\/p>\n
After the exhilarating taste of Tuscany, Frye was thoroughly dismayed.\u00a0 “History of Roman art: bastard Etruscan, bastard Greek, stolen Greek, bastard Oriental, bastard Northern Italian, bastard copies of bastard Greek, bastard Dutch, and various kinds of eclectic bastardy.”\u00a0 In viewing the “junk piles” — the Thermae, the Vatican, the Laterine — he caught a glimmer in the development of Greek sculpture but most everything disappointed.\u00a0 Even what was good was diminished by irritants.\u00a0 The Vatican obsessively plastered fig leaves on nude sculpture.\u00a0 An Italian mania for “restoring” friezes had even spread to the supposedly inviolable Sistine Chapel.\u00a0 There was opportunity, however, of seeing a more enticing contemporary side of Rome — in its opera and ballet — but on the pretext of disliking Verdi, Frye passed up the chance to see a production of Rigoletto<\/em>.\u00a0 Although he was still suffering a degree of intolerance (Beethoven good, Verdi bad), there was undeniable considerations of money and his still insistent desire to keep working on Blake. (136)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nFrye on Shakespeare and opera in A Natural Perspective<\/em>:<\/p>\nThe only place where the tradition of Shakespearean romantic comedy has survived with any theatrical success, as we should expect, is opera.\u00a0 As long as we have Mozart or Verdi or Sullivan to listen to, we can tolerate identical twins and lost heirs and love potions and folk tales; we can even stand a fairy queen if she is under two hundred pounds.\u00a0 And when we look for the most striking modern parallels to Twelfth Night<\/em> or The Tempest<\/em>, we think first of all of Figaro <\/em>and The Magic Flute<\/em>.\u00a0 (25)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-_Mr4d_ixSI Maria Callas sings “D’amor sull’ali rosee” — on the rosy wings of love — from Il trovatore On this date in 1853 Verdi’s Il trovatore premiered in Rome. John Ayre in his biography describes a stopover in Rome during Frye’s 1937 visit to Italy, including an opportunity to take in a Verdi opera: After […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5,102,146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anniversaries","category-music","category-shakespeare"],"yoast_head":"\n
Il trovatore - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/01\/19\/il-trovatore\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Il trovatore - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-_Mr4d_ixSI Maria Callas sings “D’amor sull’ali rosee” — on the rosy wings of love — from Il trovatore On this date in 1853 Verdi’s Il trovatore premiered in Rome. 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