Word: arcadians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...remains potent. If opera is primarily about singing-sheer, glorious vocalism over all other elements-then these may be parlous times. Where today is a real Aida on the order of Emmy Destinn, an echt Siegfried like Lauritz Melchior or a true Norma such as Rosa Ponselle? In the Arcadian past, there were giants on the earth. How can contemporary opera possibly compete with its starry past...
...most famous example of Manet's contrariness is, of course, the Déjeuner: two women-one completely naked, the other virtually so-and two clothed men, occupying the foreground of a sketchily painted Arcadian landscape. We have been taught to see its allusions stick out like elbows (here a homage to Giorgione, there a quotation from Marcantonio Raimondi), but what infuriated the audience at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, and has caused so many gallons of ink to be spilled on it since, is its insolubility as narrative. An "uncouth riddle," one critic called...
...most Arcadian picture in this show is Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816, almost the last word on Eden-as-Property. The enameled lawns and bulky cows, the relaxed zigzag of planes leading the eye toward the pink villa, the swans and fishermen riding on a serene sheet of water stitched with silver light: this is the epitome of civilized landscape. Like the best work of Jacob van Ruisdael, the 17th century Dutchman whom Constable considered a master of "natural" vision, Wivenhoe Park manages to be both real and ideal; it is a powerful (though subdued) instrument of fantasy as well...
...moved his operation from the Pacific to the Greek islands. Instead of titillating his young audience with a little sanitized incest, he offers them a genial disquisition on the joys of the menage a trois. Visually, however, the formula is as before-plenty of skin displayed before Arcadian scenery. The boy (Peter Gallagher) has a male-model pout for all emotions, and his American girlfriend (Daryl Hannah) obviously flunked elocution in high school, but their mutual friend from France (Valerie Quennessen) carries a nicely knowing quality about her. The writing and direction are appropriate to the setting: simple and primitive...
...become more agitated, broken and silky. In one of his small masterpieces, The Climbing Path, L'Hermitage, Pontoise, 1875, he gave a view of roofs through a dappled grid of tree trunks the sort of beautiful abstruseness one associates with Cézanne. But always there remained an Arcadian sense of order-a confidence in reasonable appetite, one of whose physical manifestations was the fruitful, vaporous and lovingly cultivated landscape of the Seine-et-Oise...