Word: brookes
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...review of Peter Brook's recent version of Georges Bizet's Carmen [Dec. 21] at the Bouffes de Nord in Paris collapses when it argues, "Would anyone think of touching up the Mona Lisa, redesigning St. Peter's, or editing Paradise Lost? These works already exist as painting, edifice and book; they are frozen in time. By its very nature, however, an opera (or play, for that matter) exists by reconstructing it anew from its blueprint. There is no aesthetic rule that says something cannot be left out or rearranged. The only valid criterion is: Does...
Soviet mathematicians who have emigrated to the United States include David Kazhdan, professor of Mathematics at Harvard; Kac, of MIT; Boris Moischezon and Gregory Chudnovsky of Columbia University; Boris Weisfeiler and L.N. Vaserstein of Pennsylvania State University; Mikhael Gromov of the State University of New York at Stony Brook; and IIya Piaketakii-Shapiro of Yale University...
Perhaps the root of that failure lay in the fundamental incompatibility of Marxism-Leninism with freedom. A Leninist party must assume that it is infallible; it can brook no opposition. That system, as imposed on Poland by the Soviet Union, almost seemed capable of making significant changes during the past 16 months. But the survival instincts of the party and the geopolitical realities facing Poland doomed Walesa's mission...
...Brook defends his treatment of Carmen as something historically necessary: "Brick by brick, layer by layer, opera has been encased over the centuries to the point where today it is perhaps the most unnatural object in the whole of our society. To correct this, we must go back to the very roots of what the composer has in mind, to restore opera to its natural life...
...production's dramatic effectiveness, it is to be hoped that Brook's Carmen will not be widely imitated. Would anyone think of touching up the Mono Lisa, redesigning St. Peter's or editing Paradise Lost? Opera is in many eyes a more suspect art form, and thus it is fair game. But composers usually know their own works, and later interpreters should look closely at the foundation before they start removing the bricks. -By Michael Walsh. Reported by William Blaylock/Paris