Word: divina
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Have no doubt about who you are," Maria Callas once counseled a student soprano. La Divina, as she was called, was talking about the art of portraying an operatic heroine onstage. But she might have been offering her philosophy of life. She came out of an unhappy childhood-appallingly fat and resentful and lonely-and clawed her way to success and greatness with a singlehearted ferocity that awed even her enemies. Conductor Tullio Serafin, her indispensable mentor in the crucial early days, was tossed aside temporarily-for daring to record La Traviata with another soprano. Enraged at the Callas...
...sees some negative consequences: "a certain flattening of personality" and perhaps "a stunting effect on creativity, devotion, courage and similar forms of transcendence. Has it not been said that if Dante had married Beatrice, we would not have had the Divina Commedia...
...early fifties, already sees the world divided between an innocent proletariat (an urbanized "noble savage") and an evil, decadent bourgeoisie. His prose development follows a similar pattern; a growing rigidity of perception is apparent when one compares "Ragazzi di vita" (also written in the fifties) to "La Divina Mimesis," a parody of the Divine Comedy he was working on at his death. Pasolini always wrote in parables, but in his later work his symbols become estranged from any reality. "The Divine Mimesis" is full of wornout catchphrases of the Italian left; the souls Pasolini-Dante meets in his Inferno...