Word: claudel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Brazil's famed Architect Oscar Niemeyer designed the chapel 16 years ago for Belo Horizonte (pop. 650,000), he was inspired by French Poet Paul Claudel's statement: "A church is God's hangar on earth." But to Belo Horizonte's Roman Catholic archbishop, Niemeyer's hangar looked more like the devil's bomb shelter -a parabolic vault of glass and stucco, with an emaciated Christ glaring from a huge fresco by Painter Candido Portinari. Worse, Architect Niemeyer and Painter Portinari were godless Communists. Despite protests by Belo Horizonte's Mayor Juscelino...
...performance of the 20-year-old work, opening with Joan at the stake and flashing back and forth through her persecution, trial and condemnation, revealed the basic weakness in the libretto by France's late Poet-Ambassador (to the U.S. in 1927-33) Paul Claudel: its tendency to reduce a profound, many-faceted conflict to charcoal black and Rinso white. But Bernstein gave the music the surging, evocative reading that its subject demands, kept a near-perfect balance be tween orchestra, soloists and his acres of chorus. Actress Montealegre gave her reading with luminous conviction and a fine sense...
...sophisticated political variety. One day on San Francisco's KPFA-FM there was a book review by Bohemian Poet Kenneth Rexroth; the next, a talk by Art Critic Hubert Crehan on "The 'Scandalous' Art of D.H. Lawrence''; the day after, a performance of Paul Claudel's Christophe Colomb in French, with Jean-Louis Barrault, and for the kiddies a dramatization of The Wind in the Willows. Listeners could tune in talks by a pacifist, a spokesman for the Socialist Workers Party, the conservatives' conservative Russell Kirk, and a psychiatrist who testified...
...present trip to the New World, Barrault began by saluting another man's more famous voyage there. Christophe Colomb, written by the late French poet (and Ambassador to the U.S.) Paul Claudel, celebrates the discoverer of America as no American playwright has ever bothered to do. Not a play but a pageant, a piece of "total theater," Christophe Colomb employs language, music, choruses, crowds, ballet, a movie screen, a narrator. Nor is Colomb just biographical. It is encrusted with philosophic thought, is suffused with Catholic Poet Claudel's intense religious feeling, and indeed concludes with Queen Isabella...
Hope & Despair. For 300 years, the great dialogue in France has been between Faith and Reason, between Pascal, Bossuet and Chateaubriand on one hand, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau on the other. That dialogue animated the 27-year correspondence between Poet-Diplomat Paul Claudel, an unswerving Catholic who never doubted God, and André Gide. the backslid Protestant who never doubted the individual-a controversy generally conducted in scrupulously courteous and self-Centered letters, but frequently so agitated that one or the other broke off the correspondence. They ended by not speaking to each other...