Free Republic

Another of grandfather Jack Bell's stories. This one is about a 1902 gunfight grandfather was in at the bottom of a mine. Later on he was, at various times, a game warden, Deputy Sheriff of Gunnison County, Colorado and Deputy Sheriff of Verdi, Nevada. The quotes in the story come from testimonials put out to get people to buy stock in his 1906 Jack Bell Gold Mining Company when he started a gold rush in Buckskin, Nevada.

Dr. Philip Gossett, a retired music scholar and professor of music at the University of Chicago who was considered one of the world's foremost experts on 19th-century Italian opera, died Monday at his home in the Hyde Park neighborhood. He was 75. The cause of death was progressive supernuclear palsy, a rare degenerative disease, according to his son, Jeffrey. Gossett was widely respected as an authority on the operas of Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi, having served as general editor of the collected Rossini works and coordinating editor of the collected Verdi works. The latter edition was published by the...

The IT group IBM apparently is planning massive job cuts in Germany. According to the trade union Verdi, the Group has informed on Wednesday about the planned reduction of nearly 1,000 jobs by March 2017th This was announced by Verdi in a newsletter. Primarily affects service segments. The group had invited the workers' representatives to negotiations for a social plan and balance of interests. In Hannover, a region should be shut down with about 200 employees, said a Verdi representatives. The Hanover stay but generally preserved. "IBM has informed the participation and invited to negotiations," confirmed an IBM spokesman. A...

Verdi, a German trade union which triggered the only successful European Citizens’ Initiative so far, is throwing its weight behind a new project on press freedom. With 2 million members, it could easily get the 1 million signatures the EU requires to lodge a citizens’ appeal. But the Lisbon Treaty also says the 1 million people must come from at least seven EU countries. The purpose-built campaign for the new project, the European initiative for media pluralism, partly funded by two foundations—Open Society and Adessium—calls on the European Commission to consider a legislative proposal to fight media concentration and to...

Two hundred years ago today, in a small northern Italian village, a couple named Verdi — tavern owners by trade — welcomed the birth of a baby boy who would later change the face of opera forever. And, whether we recognize it or not, on the bicentennial of his birth, Giuseppe Verdi is still vital. His natural habitat is the opera house, but over the years Verdi's music has taken up residence in some surprising places, from the Marx Brothers' 1935 spoof of Il trovatore in A Night at the Opera, to last month when Renee Fleming sang the Top...

Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner wrote some of the most famous music of all time. They became icons of their nations during turbulent eras: Verdi for Italy and Wagner for Germany. Their music still moves us, and their operas still play to packed houses around the world. But, in many ways, the two composers were fundamentally opposites, and on the occasion of their Bicentennial year, WQXR presents a one-hour program exploring these crucial differences. We learn how these two men of music, both born in the same year, but flowering in completely different directions, ultimately empowered both the greatest and...

Wagner and Verdi are destined to be linked forever, however awkwardly, since they were both born in 1813: Wagner in Leipzig, Germany, on May 22; Verdi in little Roncole, Italy, in the Duchy of Parma, on Oct. 9 or 10. (The records are not clear.) They never met and had little good to say about each other. Wagner tended to be circumspect on the subject of Verdi. But in an 1899 interview with a German newspaper Verdi, then 86, called Wagner “one of the greatest geniuses” who left treasures of “immortal worth.” Verdi added that as an Italian, he could...

It’s apt that Wagner and Verdi were born in the same year. They are romantic opera’s two great antipodes, united in stature, but divided in almost everything else. They embody two completely different outlooks on life and art, which are rooted in the cultures of their respective nations. That’s why every German city has a Wagnerstrasse, and every Italian one a Corso Giuseppe Verdi. Though their supporters often did battle, the composers warily avoided each other. Verdi had a grudging respect for Wagner, but he warned younger Italian composers against following the Wagnerian path. Wagner wouldn't even grant Verdi that...

Tenor and LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo fulfilled a longstanding dream by adding the baritone title role of Giuseppe Verdi's Simon Boccanegra to his vast repertoire in 2009 in Berlin, with subsequent performances in London, New York, Milan and Madrid. He is now singing the role for the first time in Los Angeles, in the work's LA Opera premiere. Join Classical KUSC Sunday, February 19 at 2 p.m. for a live broadcast of LA Opera's production of Simon Boccanegra.

Gustavo Dudamel is back in town, and Thursday night he conducted a magnificently theatrical performance of Verdi’s Requiem that felt like his first real concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. All Los Angeles, of course, knows that last month Dudamel began his tenure with a free event at the Hollywood Bowl, and that was followed by nervous-making high-profile programs in Walt Disney Concert Hall the next week.

Mozart’s lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute’s nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano. Nor does it include masturbation, urination as foreplay, or forced oral sex. Europe’s new breed of opera directors, however, know better than Mozart what an opera should contain. So not only does the Abduction at Berlin’s Komische Oper feature the aforementioned activities; it also replaces Mozart’s graceful ending with a Quentin Tarantino–esque bloodbath and the promise of future perversion. Welcome to Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”), the style of opera direction now prevalent in Europe....

The Reno Fire Department says the Verdi fire is now burning 5,000 acres. The fire's quick growth led officials to downgrade their containment estimates to 10 percent. Firefighters say about 800 homes in Reno's Somersett neighborhood are in the path of the fire, but a fire department spokesman says he can not say whether the homes are immediately threatened. The Reno Fire Department is handling structure protection. No evacuations are in place at this time. The fire is a mile north of Interstate 80 and the Boomtown Hotel-Casino just east of the California state line. The Interstate remains open...

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A one-legged piano and a chorus was all Jewish prisoners at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia needed to express their defiance of the Nazis. Sixty-three years ago, Jewish prisoner and conductor Rafael Schachter gathered 150 fellow Jews in a basement at the camp to perform Giuseppe Verdi's "Requiem" for the Nazis in Latin. Throughout the piece was a plea for liberation. The prisoners felt safe singing it because the Nazis did not get the meaning the Jewish people put behind it, said Natalie Pyle, a music student who will be a junior at The Catholic University...

German public sector workers fighting plans to extend their working hours have widened their strike action to cover most of the country. An estimated 20,000 local and regional authority staff including nurses, cooks and cleaners have joined the largest public sector strike in 14 years. They are protesting against plans to extend weekly working hours by 90 minutes, from 38.5 to 40 hours a week. The industrial action...has now spread to 10 of Germany's 16 states... Leaders at Verdi - Germany's biggest union with 2.4 million members - have warned that the strikes could last for up to six weeks.