Word: belshazzar
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Composer Walton, one of the smart devotees of arty London Poetess Edith Sitwell, started out in the early 19205 doing clever satirical fluff. But when, in 1931, he burst from her mother-of-pearly cell with a fire-belching oratorio called Belshazzar's Feast, the international musical world sat up and took notice. His First Symphony, which followed, got him talked about in terms of Finland's Jean Sibelius...
...long believed that the only important function of music is to encourage revolution. In 1929, while staid London music lovers frowned and looked the other way, London's musical leftists, led by Composer Bush, drew throngs to a class-angled production of Handel's venerable sacred oratorio, Belshazzar. Handel's serene 18th-Century score was sung with traditional massiveness by a chorus of 1,800 voices. But it was so staged that the fall of Handel's Babylonians was made to represent the fall of capitalism, and the victory of Handel's Persians, the victory...