Word: demon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same operas over and over," he says. "But I am always looking for the unusual or the rarely performed works." The Paris Robert le Diable, the saga of a man who discovers he is a devil's son, was one such project. Another is Anton Rubinstein's obscure The Demon, whose title role was sung by the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin; Ramey hopes to perform the part someday...
...light and of darkness are at war in everyone's soul. Life struggles with death. Hart dramatized the conflict more vividly and, because of his line of work, more visibly, than most of us do. Part of him aspired to great achievement, to ideals. But a self-subverting demon was furiously at work as well. A pre-emptive annihilation of self: Hart describes what a great President he would have been, and then -- poof! -- is gone. The fantasy makes reality in the air, and then annihilates it. Hart as Prospero...
...great artists are emotional idiots savants, charting the terra incognita of human experience by going over the edge. It is a lovely delusion. It excuses so many excesses and failures, gives rise to so many cautionary legends. George Gordon, Lord Byron incarnated one such fable: the poet as demon lover. He was dead at 36. Joe Orton, the English playwright who died in 1967, lived out another. He cruised danger as if it were a cute trick in a public gents', and was murdered at 34 -- for love! Nice work, guys. By your example you spread the word...
...Damn it, woman. You were hired by the elevator company to annoy me, weren't you? Admit it, she-demon spawn of Satan! Admit...
...character, great or small (and truth to tell, they're all small), has the juice of comic originality in him. In jail with Hi, one convict strums Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the old banjo. The bounty hunter -- he's real, not just a Hi dream -- is a demon road warrior, a warthog from hell who grenades rabbits and torches roadside flowers, can catch flies between his filthy fingers, and has a secret tattoo of Woody Woodpecker on his left pectoral. Gale and Evelle (lots of gender-bent names in this picture) lecture Ed on the importance of breast...