Word: basse
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...presents a successful, gorgeous drama-spectacle. Only Satanic music could express the diabolism of the plot. The score provided, far from being profound as sin, is puerile as the theft of jam. It dares the singers to vault along treacherous arpeggios, skip over unsound scales, probe the depths of bass tones, just to prove that it can be done. It is done, and surprisingly well, too. Claudia Muzio, one of the world's great dramatic sopranos, almost made the difficult Ginevra role take on the semblance of life and opera. Not less effective was Luigi Montesanto who boasted loudly...
...Keyserling's new book,* which, unfortunately, is about one-tenth as readable. In it, the state of wedlock has been treated as a musical theme is treated to turn it into a symphony. Count Keyserling is the conductor. To the woodwinds of psychoanalysis, the percussives of aristocracy, the bass viols of biology, the brass of anthropology, the muted strings of art and mysticism, are assigned various parts. The players include-besides several German savants little known in the U. S. -Havelock Ellis, Rabindranath Tagore, Leo Frobenius, Jakob Wassermann, C. G. Jung, Alfred Adler, Beatrice Hinkle. Some of the titles...
...Song of the Volga Boatmen contributes its mite as the tribesmen open the play with the Riding song of the Riffs, a rare gem in basso profundo, with excellent time and almost no tune, which will defy college men all over the country who sing tenor and aspire to bass...
Miss Mary Cherry, a perpetual guest, is Uncle George's prize opponent in argument. She quotes Scripture in her bass voice with venomous effect; nags him for a sot and schemes against him about his daughter's marriage. Parson Bates, a hard-drinking, ruddy giant who mispronounces "sacrilegious," is a third party to their wrangles...
...spasmodic spurts he tells the intimate story of a sensitive boy struggling to become a writer in the face of physical frailty and parental distrust, in mean towns built beside buffalo wallows. Beneath the burden runs a hysterically bitter ground-bass-a dirge for everything Puritan-and snarling discords to the effect that constipation was the pioneers' curse; that their children were rickety, their politics poltroonish, their women spavined, their teeth acid, their minds (including the author's) stunted and deranged, all because they failed to raise cabbages and take lime into their systems...