Until the mid-nineteenth century, opera was wedded to rhythm and rhyme. Librettists supplied composers with heaps of verse for arias and other vocal numbers, alongside chunks of prose recitative that allowed for interstitial exposition. The convention began to break down with Wagner, who expanded recitative to epic proportions. In 1867, the Russian composer Alexander Dargomyzhsky took a further step, setting Pushkin’s blank-verse play “The Stone Guest” almost verbatim. Mussorgsky followed with “Boris Godunov,” a Pushkin adaptation on a monumental scale. Thus arose a genre that became known as Literaturoper, because nothing officially exists until it is named in German. Composers did not need librettists at all; they could make direct use of plays and other literary properties. Two formidable prose operas emerged just after 1900: Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a condensation of the play by Maurice Maeterlinck; and Strauss’s “Salome,” after the decadent drama by Oscar Wilde. This summer, Des Moines Metro Opera, one of America’s boldest smaller companies, staged those two works side by side, sending psychic shivers into the hot summer night.
Denne historien er fra August 05, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra August 05, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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AFFINITY COMEDY
The state of the Netflix standup special.
DUTY DANCING
How Seamus Heaney wrote his way through a war.
DESPERATELY SEEKING
The supreme contradictions of Simone Weil.
WILD THING
MJ Lenderman resists the smoothing, neutering effects of technology.
LUCK OF THE DRAW
Nate Silver argues that poker can help us game our uncertain world.
GREEN SLEEVES
“What I want to know,” the woman said to the therapist, “is why the voices always say mean, terrible things.
DRUG OF CHOICE
AI. is transforming the way medicines are made.
EVERY OBITUARY'S FIRST PARAGRAPH
Alfred T. Alfred, whose invention of the plastic fastener that affixes tags to clothing upended the tag industry and made him one of America’s youngest multimillionaires—until he lost his plastic fastener fortune in a 1993 game of badminton, as depicted in the Lifetime original movie “Bad Minton”— died on Saturday. He was eighty-one.
BE HER GUEST
The plush ambience of Ina Garten's good fortune.
SPREADING THE WEALTH
Why a young heiress asked fifty strangers to redistribute her fortune.