Word: cantos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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RICHARD TUCKER: THE ART OF BEL CANTO (Columbia). The great American tenor sings the ravishingly beautiful songs and arias (Caro mio ben, Gid il sole dal Gange) that constitute the canon of bel canto. His vocal line, the essential element in bel canto, is lyrical, firm and without breaks. There are more sensual interpretations of the art, but few more satisfying...
...returning to the same unconquered magnum opus as if to Everest. A Madison Avenue executive back from Martha's Vineyard this month confessed that he had attacked Dante's Divine Comedy for the fifth straight year, only to bog down once again in the first canto. "But," he added bravely, "I'm getting sort of fond of Inferno." His secret hope, and that of many another frustrated bibliophile, is that next year it will rain during his entire vacation...
...last canto, Dante is granted the Beatific Vision, and as he looks upon the face of God he rises to what Eliot called "the highest point poetry has ever reached or ever can reach...
...Commedia is composed of three colossal canticles: I'lnferno, il Purgatorio, il Paradiso. Each canticle, if the first canto of I'lnferno is counted as a prologue, contains 33 cantos, and each canto contains about 142 lines composed in terza rima, a rhyme scheme (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on) so cruelly intricate that only Dante ever mastered its hazards...
Simplicity of language, on the other hand, does not prevent what Critic Erich Auerbach described as "artful and meticulous composition unequaled in the whole of literature." The last canto of I'Inferno, for instance, descends to the depths of despair through a brilliant cacophony of rhymes that snarl, snigger, squeak, squitter, screech like a sackful of demented imps. And the structure of the entire poem is a miracle of symmetry; all its canticles are consciously articulated in a great Golden Section, an ancient system of proportion in which the nature of God and the structure of the human soul...