Word: psalms
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Dates: during 1930-1930
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Seventeen years ago the primitive, pagan rhythms of Le Sacre du Printemps established Russian Igor Stravinsky as the most original, most compelling of modern composers. Last week in Boston his Symphonic de Psaumes (Symphony of Psalms), in spirit far removed from his sensual celebration of fertility, was given as a part of the Boston Symphony's ambitious semicentennial program. The new Stravinsky takes as text three excerpts from the Psalms (in the English version: Psalm XXXIX, Verses 12, 13; XL: 1, 2, 3; CL complete), uses a chorus to describe in Latin the transition from abject penitence to exultant...
...Goethe, but it is certainly quite as sound as Parson Weems' Life of Washington or Uncle Tom's Cabin." His concluding remarks are a typical piece of Menckenian irony: he describes a hanging he once reported, at which the Baptist prisoner loudly recited the 23d Psalm while the sheriff and the hangman were busied with the final preparations; the fall of the drop cut short the prisoner's words of praise. Says Mencken: "As an American I naturally spend most of my time laughing, but that time I did not laugh...