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All documents at this web site are of type
PDF (Portable Document Format). When I began
collecting information thirty years ago, the
natural goal was to have data that could be
printed on paper. It did not seem probable
then that these documents would eventually
become so large that printing would be
impossible.
They have been created with groff, a
GNU version of the nearly forty-year-old Unix
typesetter that was called troff. Groff
generates postscript that is then
converted to PDF with Adobe's Acrobat
Distiller.
Even today, HTML does not provide strict enough
control over a document's physical format
(appearing differently on FireFox, Explorer,
and Netscape) to encourage me to re-engineer
them, so they remain as PDF.
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The Callas project, first in this series,
began at a time in the late 1980s when
copies of the Arthur Germond book (out-of-print
and pulped after a short life in the stores)
were so expensive (about $350) and impossible to
find, that I copied it word-for-word into my
work-place computer from a copy that I had
borrowed from the Music School Library of the
University of Colorado in Boulder.
Germond's chronology was so comprehensive and
error free that most of it remains here
unchanged. My contributions have been to add
the chronology from the Athens years, which to
my knowledge is still the only source for the
Greek programs in the Latin alphabet; I was
able to obtain a list of all the student names
from the Juilliard School, while Germond's
work already provided the dates and content of
each master-class; I added the names of the
production designers; created two comprehensive
indices; and created the compact disc and DVD
discographies.
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As with the Callas project, the data for my
Corelli work began with theft of statistics
from another book, this one by Gilberto Starone.
However, in this case many corrections were
made, and missing casts were added and fleshed
out to include as many of the comprimario roles
as could be found, etc. I created the index of
his repertoire and performance history as well
as comprehensive discographies of compact discs
and DVDs.
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Returning to New York after three years in
Frankfurt, I met Thomas Kaufman in Baltimore,
who may own the most comprehensive collection
of opera house chronology books in the world.
I used his collection to research Di Stefano and
Gobbi from scratch. In addition to many newly
published books (unavailable at the time of
Germond's and Starone's research), some house
chronologies, such as La Scala's, began to
appear online. At Tom's insistence, I also
began newspaper research, first with
international papers at the Library of Congress,
then at the NY Public Library.
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While researching the singers, one brick wall
could never be overcome or ignored, the
utter absence of information for the city of
Philadelphia. Philadelphia was an important
opera city. Because of its proximity to
New York City many singers engaged at the
Metropolitan would also travel there to
perform, whereas Boston, for example, was five
hours away.
I could almost ignore Philadelphia while
researching Di Stefano and Gobbi, but not
Corelli. Fellow researchers had said that
Philadelphia could not be done because of the
endless number of changing companies that
compeatively performed there. I took this as a
challenge, and my singer research came to an
end, as I decided to document a city rather
than additional individual careers.
Initially, the scope of this project was the
Twenieth-Century, the period when most of the
artists contemporary of my generation performed.
Not long after beginning the project, I learned
from Tom Kaufman that Nineteenth-Century
Philadelphia had been documented by a man named
John Curtis. This unpublished work, residing
at the Pennsylvania Historical Society, was for
the purpose of any extensive reserch all but
inaccessible. Because of their short hours due
to limited funding, access to it could not be
had on weekends (I lived and worked in NYC).
The historical society would not allow more
than a few pages to be photocopied during each
visit, and would fight resisting anyone's
requests for photocopies at all.
Soon I would discover the first half of the
John Curtis work was available in carbon-copy
format (from his own typewriter) at the Free
Library. Much later, someone made the other
half available from photocopy, which I in turn
photocopied. The urge to make the statistical
portion of his work, the non-copyrightable
performance data, available at my web site
became overwhelming. John Curtis' long
narrative covering the history of Philadelphia's
opera companies, opera houses, impresarios,
and biographical sketches of the performers
remains unavailable here because of copyright.
My contribution to the Curtis years has been two
comprehenive indices for works and performers.
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Perhaps this summary should have begun with the
Disclaimer... In any case, all documents
featured here should be used as a starting
point for research and not as a conclusive
source.
Accuracy has been paramount, but time has not
allowed exhaustive search in materials that I
have not had readily at hand. For example, I
have not been able to visit Boston University
to explore Tito Gobbi's personal papers archived
there; I did not have access to microfilm of
the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin while living
in New York, so my Philadelphia research derives
principally from one major newspaper, the
Inquirer. The Pennsylvania Historical Society
also has a large cache of theater programs
which remains unexplored by me. I have not yet
written to the major opera houses for which no
published day-by-day chronologies exist, Naples
being the most important (the Di Stefano and
Gobbi chronologies suffer greatly because of
this).
I am always greatful for corrections and
additions no matter how small from anyone, and
am eager to give full credit to volunteers who
which to add their own research.
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