Word: commedia
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...portent was fulfilled in a blaze of genius for which the bird of the sun is no intemperate metaphor. For seven centuries La Commedia, which in 14,233 lines of lordly language describes the poet's descent into hell and ascent into heaven through the refining fires of purgatory, has been widely considered the greatest poem ever composed; and its author has been virtually deified by the critics. T. S. Eliot pronounced him "the most universal of poets in the modern languages," and added: "Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth...
After reading it, and reading selectively in any of the six superior translations of La Commedia available in the U.S.,* no reasonable man can deny that Dante was indeed a titanic personality and that La Commedia is a masterpiece: a colossal but exquisite crystal in which the total experience of human being is reconstituted in radiance. At one level, La Commedia is a spiritual autobiography; at another, a parable of the progress of the soul; at a third, one of the noblest love stories ever told. Incidentally it is a manual of mysticism and an encyclopedia of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic...
...Comedy, which was overall the best of the three pieces. The Comedy was the closest thing to "Jazz," both musically and choreographically influ-performance. John Lewis's music is heavily influenced by the Jazz style he must use in the Modern Jazz Quartet. The Comedy depicts characters from the Commedia dell'Arte, an improvisational type of popular drama which Lewis believes was to the late seventeenth century as jazz is to the middle twentieth. The ballet was first performed under Lewis's baton in Paris...
...WHAT A LOVELY WAR. Blending song and satire, commedia dell' arte garb and Brechtian notions, Joan Littlewood and her "thinking clowns" effectively depict the foolishness and ironies of the 1914-18 war. FIDDLER ON THE ROOF is a nostalgic folk-musical version of Sholom Aleichem's tales of life in czarist Russia and Aleichem's gentle dairyman, Tevye, brought to life by Zero Mostel's larger-than-life interpretation...
...firm hand that guides Lovely War is Joan Littlewood's, the musical's voice and mind are often Bertolt Brecht's. By decking her men and women in Pierrot and Pierrette outfits, she puts commedia dell'arte garb on the Brechtian notion that in the 20th century the individual is no longer a meaningful entity. It was Brecht, too, who recognized that a nostalgic song put in a satirical context could then be savored for its sentimentality even while it was being bitterly spoofed. Songs like Pack Up Your Troubles and Keep the Home Fires Burning...