Word: offing
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Sergei Prokofiev was one of seven Soviet composers (among the others: Khachaturian and Shostakovich) denounced in 1948 "for formalistic and anti-democratic tendencies in music which are alien to the Soviet people." Confessing his "guilt," the great Russian composer promised to mend his Western ways in his next opera, which...
The opera proved that the cultural commissars Lad a supersensitive nose for bourgeois decay and no ear for music. They had completely ignored a libretto that wallowed in patriotism, and a highly melodious score. Based on a Stalin prize-winning novel, Prokofiev's Story tells of a World War...
The curtain rose on a heath full of shaggy, diabolical hags hurling harsh-mouthed imprecations into the night. Their wild language was a witches' brew of medieval Bavarian dialect, laced with great lumps of Latin and Greek; in the background, no fewer than 20 different percussion instruments fired the...
Under a black sky, with the star of Bethlehem nowhere in sight, the witches were conjuring to prevent the birth of the Christ child. Then, as if by divine providence, they plummeted into the depths-via stage elevator. Five shepherds struggled across the snowy heath, settled in Brueghel postures around...
In the concluding minutes of the work, the distant heavenly host (on tape) ethereally sang what seemed to be an authentic, slightly dissonant Latin cantus, but was in fact one of Orff's own haunting evocations of the medieval spirit. Then a procession of children filed across the starlit...