Word: cressida
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Another of our London correspondents, Joan Bruce, spent Tuesday working on two music stories. One was on Sir William Walton's first opera. Troilus and Cressida (see Music). She was digging up background on the composer and his music so that the writer in New York would have this information before the premiere in Covent Garden. This done, she got ready to go to Leicestershire to track down a lead on a story that looked like a good bet for TIME'S Music section in the future...
After five years' toil, Britain's famed Sir William Walton, 52, last week unveiled his first opera, Troihis and Cressida, at London's Covent Garden. The melodramatic plot (of amorous scheming and betrayal in ancient Troy) was lusty, but the heavily sweet music resembled Walton's lyrical Viola Concerto more than his uproarious Belshazzar's Feast. The London Times called it "a great tragic opera," and the Daily Express hailed "the proudest hour for British music since the premiere of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes." Sir William made his own evaluation...
...have to see him on a platform stage," said Brooks Atkinson, venerable drama critic of the venerable New York Times, last week after watching the production of seven Shakespearean plays at the Theater Festival of Ohio's Antioch College. The plays were all minor (e.g., Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens), the actors were hardly more than adequate, the productions unfinished. But even so, the performances on Antioch's open-air platform stage were, in Atkinson's opinion, proof that "the sort of marshmallow Shakespeare represented by the Katharine Hepburn As You Like...
...Secret Love. For the past three years, he has been working on a new opera. "British composers," says Walton, "are all writing operas now." With about 20 minutes of music left to write, Walton thinks he may finish in another year. The work is Troilus and Cressida, based on Chaucer's poem, not Shakespeare's play ("You can't set Shakespeare's to music"), and the world's top opera houses have already made bids for the premiere. The story, adapted by British Librettist Christopher Hassall, is practically foolproof opera material. The scene...
Manning is a self-taught expert on many subjects, and occasionally astounds his guests. On one trip across with New York's ex-Representative Joe Baldwin, he and Baldwin traded lines from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Manning puts his best social foot forward dancing. He has standing orders with the chief steward to steer the best dancers in his direction. Says Manning with a grin: "The only reason I'm on these ships is that I can tango...