Word: cole
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rockefeller also announced the Class Day Speakers. They are: Orator, Eugene Clements; Ivy Orator, Thomas Babe; Poet, Fritz Eager; Odist, David Cole; Chorister, Bentley Layton...
...month ago I attacked the student opera The Cursed Dauncers for its facile use of medieval setting. The Conversion of Saint Pelagia, the Harlot, by undergraduates David Cole and Ronald Perera deserves to be attacked on the same grounds, but much more harshly. If the first opera had a plot with only half a dramatic issue, this one side-steps cheaply a powerful moral question. If the Daunsers exerted a shallow dramatic impact, this opera is simply not a drama, and its production made it all the more a sham...
...natural issue for modern questioning of traditional ethics. Christianity has taken a dramatic position on this issue, giving no quarter to sins brought on by the harlot, yet offering her soul communal redemption. But in by-passing the powerful intellectual and emotional conflicts posed by the Church's stand, Cole and Perera give Saint Pelagia its sorry artistic impotence...
...sickly melancholy which seems quite inappropriate to her sins, the supposed point of it all. At the same time, when she appears, surrounded by suitors, it is always to the same cheery dance tune which first accompanied the banter of the two monks. Because Perera's popular melodies and Cole's humor fail to guide the opera's ideas and dramatic progression (as such devices do well in West Side Story), the product...
Really the opera concerns itself only with the monk's search for his daughter. Pelagia's conversion seems off-stage and is dwarfed by the reunion with her father in the final scene--a disgracefully pointless ending for an experienced dramatist like Cole. The libretto's simple-minded images ("today I went wandering as a bird") and pompous archaisms (the story is "for them that have an eye to see") deaden the opera still further. The characters emerge as cute Sunday school paste...