Word: byronical
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TITLE: LORD BYRON...
...libretto by Gertrude Stein, and The Mother of Us All (1947) -- as well as on the 1928 Symphony on a Hymn Tune and the film score The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). But the work that has long intrigued Thomson's admirers is his last opera, Lord Byron, which premiered at the Juilliard School...
...Dada classic Four Saints hangs onto the fringe of the repertoire by virtue of its pigeons-on-the-grass-alas text by Stein and Thomson's proto- minimalist, oompah-pah score. Even so modest a renown is likely to elude Lord Byron, just given a handsome first recording by conductor James Bolle leading the Monadnock Festival Orchestra and a cast of mostly unknowns...
...decay. The 19th century story focuses on a startlingly gifted 13-year-old girl and her tutor, a seemingly shallow, smug university man a decade older. The 20th century story focuses on the present generation of the girl's landed family and on two biographers who are probing Byron's connections to the house, investigating the story of a mysterious hermit and researching the evolution of the English garden...
...mostly erroneous "discoveries" and deductions made about them in the present. At a deeper level the piece is a meditation on the chanciness of fame and the meaning of genius, strongly suggesting that the 19th century girl was a considerably greater figure than her celebrated house guest, Lord Byron. At its most profound, Stoppard's elegant dialogue addresses the competing principles of order and disorder in the universe...