Word: kafka
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Although Dodecaphonist Dallapiccola believes that his spiritual brother is James Joyce (he has read Ulysses eight times), Variations sounds more like a page out of Kafka. It opens with a funereal, ghostlike theme in the strings, erupts in a chilling shower of brasses, sinks to a series of restless, enervated whispers. Percussive and rhythmically complex throughout, it is scored sparely, skillfully using small instrumental combinations in strange, exhilarating blends of sound. What sets it apart from much of the desiccated twelve-tone music of the Viennese school is its sense of passion: Dallapiccola, however his music may suffer, always seems...
Night is one way of defining day. Steeped in opposites, paradoxes and negations, modern religious fiction tends to define godliness in the same way. In the novels of Kafka, Mauriac and Graham Greene, the hero is conscious not of the presence but the absence of God, not of the nearness but the distance of divine grace, not of the order but the absurdity of God's universe. Obsessively self-abased, the religious hero is a man of little faith, and his heroism is to know...
...piece of modern music is to plead that it demands a second hearing. Last week Conductor Leonard Bernstein obliged. He led the New York Philharmonic through a performance of Lukas Foss's Time Cycle for Soprano and Orchestra, an atonal work based on poems by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, all of them having to do with the flow of time, clocks or bells. With Adele Addison expertly taking the vocal part, the work proved to be one of Foss's strongest-a mosaiclike structure full of wispily haunting sonorities. After playing the rest of the program, Bernstein...
What critics exhume is seldom the writer who was buried. Where Goethe found perversity and disease, critics today find "true greatness," "a hero of the modern spirit," a precursor of Stendhal, Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka. Thomas Mann, Germany's greatest 20th century novelist, calls Von Kleist in the preface (written in 1955) to this book a "storyteller of the very first order." In this first English translation of his collected stories, the proofs are not always convincing. The compulsive violence that runs through these tales (notably Michael Kohlhaas, The Earthquake in Chile...
Innovator Foss, who is back teaching at U.C.L.A. after a year's sabbatical for composition, does not expect his system to replace the written score. He himself has just completed a fully written-out composition, Time Cycle, for Soprano and Orchestra (to texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche), which will be played for the first time by the New York Philharmonic this week. Between numbers, Foss's ensemble will do improvised "commentaries" on the songs. With the spread of controlled improvisation, Foss thinks the day may come when a typical concert will begin with bits of Bartok...