Word: critics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...magnificent sets, the opera builds from that point to a dramatic third-act climax in which Blanche's calm recitation of Deo Patri Sit Gloria is counterpoised against the offstage thuds of the guillotine and the screams of the hysterical mob. The reaction of first-night critics was divided. Some were charmed by the opera's lyricism and moved by its emotional power; others found its music imitative or thought they detected in the more elegant passages the old prewar Poulenc peeping through the sackcloth. "Fine theater, but mediocre music," said Corriere della Sera Music Critic Franco Abbiati...
...Trilling's third collection of essay is, in deed, a gathering of fugitive pieces with little collective raison d'etre except the profits which he and the Beacon Press will reap from bringing them to a new audience, nevertheless they display Trilling as a man of letters and a critical influence, perhaps more clearly than any of his previous collections. Even in the pieces which can only be read intelligently when the reader knows the subject matter, the reader discovers a critic of remarkable integrity and perception. In most of the collection, moreover, the subject matter, the reader discovers...
...even the reader who has no ulterior motives often turns to the perceptive critic, when the critic can see, and he cannot. Searching like Diogenes, he tries to use the critic for a light. Unfortunately, his instrument is as unsuitable as Diogenes', which dooms them both to failure. And he would rather not live in a barrel...
Perhaps he follows the critic's beam hoping the critic will lend it to him after a while, hoping that if he reads "Paradise Lost" often enough, he will discover his own experience. The experiment is seldom tried, and I also suspect that the poem, like the sphinx, speaks only when he expects to hear a voice, and that following the critics will produce only the voice which he has been told he will hear. If he reads a book about which he has heard enough, he can only react in those particular terms. He may reject or accept...
...this full-dress biography, the late French Critic Gérard Jean-Aubry, editor of Conrad's letters, has taken soundings along the well-charted course of the Conrad legend. The legend is well known? the young Polish exile who began to learn English from Lowestoft sailors at 21, became a ship's master at 29, voyaged to the Caribbean and the China Seas, and who, at 36, took to the shore and, despite poverty, neglect and illness, made himself a master novelist. It is all true. Jean- Aubry, who spent 20 years writing this book, fills in the blank spaces...