Word: impactions
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...quantitative terms, the 20th century seems more death-ridden than any other. Yet mass death is strangely impersonal; an 18th century hanging at Tyburn probably had more immediate impact on the watching crowd than the almost incomprehensible statistics of modern war and calculated terror have today. In the last century, Byron, Shelley, Keats and a whole generation of young poets haunted by romanticism and tuberculosis could be "half in love with easeful Death," wooing it as they would woo a woman. Even before World War I, German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke could still yearn for "the great death" for which...
...write opera unless it's you," he hit on Strindberg's play Miss Julie, whose morbid Freudian thickets "fitted me; I am fascinated with death." The Scandinavian setting, too, suited his Norwegian heritage, but he and Librettist Kenward Elmslie figured that the drama might have more impact if transformed into a love tragedy involving a Deep South heiress and her Negro servant. Timely and all that. Off to New Orleans they went to soak up some local color, only to belatedly discover that it "just wouldn't work." How about changing the locale to Hollywood, with...
...writing the same piece"), provided instead a score that is largely music-to-probe-the-subconscious-by-moody, groaning, occasionally dissonant. The few lighter moments-a duet between two village lovers, the chorus celebrating the festival of Midsummer's Eve-were charmingly melodic, but the overall impact was blandly uncompelling. The sets, which Rorem confesses he "hates," were gingerbread concoctions totally antithetical to the spirit of the opera, and Soprano Marguerite Willauer in the title role sang with the handicap of a severe cold...
...organ fantasia in the style of Cabezon. But most noteworthy is the substantial amount of Indian music and sound effects, performed both on and off stage. This has been meticulously written out, with a vast instrumentarium including slide-recorders and some twenty varieties of exotic percussion. Its impact is indescribable...
Though colonels and captains crowd the King's payroll, his prized possession is R.A.F. Flight Lieut. Marlowe, played with smashing impact by James Fox (the corrupted young aristocrat of The Servant). Marlowe becomes an apostle of King's anything-for-a-buck philosophy because it works miracles for him, tested as it is under circumstances in which his family's long heritage...