Word: virgil
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Tattered Sweater. Ailey's latest application of this mixture is in the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein Four Saints in Three Acts, which he directed for the opening this week of Opera at the Forum, the Metropolitan Opera's new minicompany devoted to works too special or small to be staged in the 3,800-seat main house...
...should pay were it taxed equiably. The hithert faceless men of the Governing Boards, who exercise almost absolute power over the affairs of the University, turn out to be successful corporate executives and lawyers, hardly the types of individuals one can easily contemplate marvelling at the beauty of Virgil or composing a viola concerto...
...overcrowded 100 years from now that part of the population will have to hibernate for half of each year to reduce demands on resources. A color spread shows how the oft-decried weathering of classical statuary can actually improve its aesthetic impact. Poet-Novelist David Slavitt modernizes Virgil's Georgics in irreverent slang that gives it surprising contemporary relevance ("Okay, Maecenas, whatever you say; farming it is: hints for happier cornfields...
...ambiguous feelings about it set in early. The poet's physician father, a Birmingham medical officer who used to stud his lectures on such public health innovations as the flush toilet with quotations from Virgil, unsettled his son by confiding that doctors never really know why their patients get well. The enormities of the age of anxiety have since produced an increasing conviction that measurable knowledge does not adequately account for, or much ease, the pain and confusion of modern life. The poet, like many another brilliant soul, has concluded that we are in God's hand...
Whatever immortality Composer Virgil Thomson wins will probably rest on his operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and Mother of Us All (1947). Sophisticated and witty, both works catch up words and music in the kind of embrace that could be devised only by a man born to write for the voice. Thus the air of eager anticipation before last week's premiere of Thomson's third opera, Lord Byron, at Manhattan's Juilliard School. Would it once and for all establish Thomson as America's foremost operatic composer...