No one has ever been able to explain exactly why Richard Wagner had such a shuddering impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, to the point where he became the subject of a somewhat unhinged international cult. Perhaps the most plausible reason has to do with the cascading power triggered by his command of music and words alike. The value of his literary output remains a matter of debate; nonetheless, his dramatic texts, which include the librettos of all thirteen of his operas, have a style indisputably their own, combining extravagant rhetoric with fail-safe narrative structures. Many composers after Wagner wrote their own librettos; few could match his furious double focus. Stephen Sondheim is the most conspicuous modern example, though he almost certainly would have hated the comparison.
Kate Soper, whose opera “The Romance of the Rose” had its première on February 18th, at Long Beach Opera, is also an unlikely candidate for the post of a latter-day Wagner. Agile, playful, quizzically erudite, she has made her name with such philosophically inclined music-theatre projects as “Here Be Sirens” and “Ipsa Dixit”—both of them self-referential meditations on the meaning of music and art. Romantic grandiosity and mythic gloom are foreign to Soper’s world. In some ways, she harks back to the medieval troubadour tradition, in which poet, composer, and singer were one. Still, she belongs to a Wagnerian lineage, however circuitous the genealogy.
この記事は The New Yorker の March 13, 2023 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の March 13, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.