Word: ago
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...bald, wizened little man whose greatest fear is that he won't live long enough to complete works he has started. Sixteen years ago he completed two acts of an opera, Moses and Aaron, but, he says, "I have not yet found the mood and power to compose the third act." Inspiration, he explains, "comes as mysteriously as hunger-and must follow the digestion of a lot of other things. One has to wait until one is called upon...
...York Philharmonic-Symphony played his early Five Pieces for Orchestra and a Manhattan critic wrote: "It was something of a discovery for audiences to find [them] works of a poet and a craftsman hardly surpassed by any musician now among us. Of course, they were written nearly 40 years ago, and had been so successfully reviled by commentators . . . that the performance has an element of daring." Manhattan's New Friends of Music, in a daring mood too, is playing a season of Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Schoenberg...
...Though Schoenberg, along with his fellow Southern Californian, Igor Stravinsky, is one of the great musical innovators of modern times, few listeners are ready yet to say that they really like Schoenberg's ear-hurting music-and certainly no one is whistling any of his tunes. Forty years ago, after he had written his popular, Wagnerish Transfigured Night (which Antony Tudor used successfully for his ballet Pillar of Fire), Schoenberg had put conventional, barbershop-type harmony far behind him, and plunged into a chromatic wonderland where all twelve tones in an octave are of equal value, and there...
...crowded combination living room-den where wife Gertrude's furniture is pushed aside to make room for a grand piano, a harmonium and an easel, Schoenberg works at manuscripts magnified for his weak eyes. Until six years ago, he played avid tennis: "Then, suddenly, no one wanted to play with me." He realizes that his opponents knew he shouldn't be playing: his asthma is so bad that when Who's Who asked him to list his recreations several years ago "I was tempted to say 'oxygen inhaling...
Nearly 30 years ago, six noisy young French composers (Les Six) rebelled against their musical elders, rocked Paris with florists' catalogues and locomotives set raucously to music. Since then, two of the six are all but forgotten. Two more became familiar names to U.S. concertgoers: Darius Milhaud, who constructs brassy, dissonant symphonies at California's Mills College, and Arthur Honegger, a hit the past two summers at Tanglewood. U.S. movie audiences heard Georges Auric's scores in such movies as Caesar and Cleopatra. That left No. 6 unaccounted for. Last week he reached...