Word: auden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first major production he designed was the 1975 Glyndebourne version of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, its libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Hockney, never embarrassed about paying homage to his aesthetic hearth gods, did the whole thing in the manner of Hogarth's engravings of that moral phantasmagoria set in 18th century England, stylizing the sets into crosshatched black-and-white etchings. Their graphic wit and punch reached a memorable climax in the final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each...
These works, and the other 74 tales in the collection, have become secular cabala, subject to endless sifting and interpretation. Hermann Hesse judged Kafka's works "an urgent formulation of the question of religious existence." W.H. Auden called Kafka "the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs." André Gide did not know what to admire most, "the naturalistic presentation of an imaginary world, or the daring turn to the mysterious." But Edmund Wilson was not ready to admire either: "Kafka is being wildly...
...that very air is the oxygen of the epigram. W.H. Auden, who collected and concocted them, readily admitted that "aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre. Implicit is a conviction that [the writer] is wiser than his readers." François de La Rochefoucauld was a duke; elbowed out of prominence in Louis XIV's court, he retreated to an estate to polish his words until nobility could see its face in the surface: "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others"; "In jealousy there is more self-love than love"; "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice...
...clumsy. Examining Chesterton's fiction, Jorge Luis Borges praised "one of the finest writers of our time," possessed with "fortunate invention . . . visual imagination and rhetorical virtues." Lionel Trilling maintained that Chesterton was "a far greater critic than his present reputation might suggest." And W.H. Auden could not think of "a single comic poem that is not a triumphant success...
...returns to a climate of "purposeful change," but it is not that easy to wean a bottle baby, and the moving scenes that follow vividly illustrate W.H. Auden's line, "We must love one another or die." Treat Williams, best known for his work in the film Prince of the City, makes a princely return to the stage. As for Philip Bosco, he is an actor's actor who, in his range, finesse, intelligence and discipline, ennobles his craft...