Word: edithe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...professor. According to John Allanbrook '99, his father did talk about the work, and tried "to convince [Allanbrook] that it wouldn't need a large string section, and that it would be easy to produce." While putting up the production may not have been easy, the operatic rendition of Edith Wharton's famous tale scheduled to open this Friday in the Eliot House dining hall is as richly storied as the novel it is based upon, backed as it is by the musical passion of both Allanbrook Senior and Junior, and that of Brett Egan '98, Lee Poulis...
When Douglas Allanbrook began composing in the '50s after several years with Nadia "a lot of people thought of the necessity of writing American works" that would be accessible and relevant to American audiences. Along these lines, a friend suggested that he write an opera based upon Ethan Frome--Edith Wharton's tragic account of forbidden love set in frigid Starkfield, Mass. Allanbrook wrote the opera in Naples in 1951 on the continuation of a Fulbright scholarship that allowed him to go to the opera at Santo Carlo every weekend. A friend he met at Harvard, John Hart...
...contrast to traditionally "suitable" subjects for opera, like classical mythology, pastoral romance and gothic drama, Ethan Frome cuts a different figure. Edith Wharton's book contains very little dialogue, and when the characters speak, they talk about timber and tobacco pouches, not their passionate and undying love...
According to John Allanbrook, "Edith Wharton communicated verbally that the story might have been better without flashbacks" so there is "a precedent to tell the story in a different way." "People are turned off by Ethan Frome simply by the way it's narrated. Wharton had the story down, then mechanically applied this 19th century device which distances the reader from the characters...
...Edith Stein was born a Jew, became a Catholic and a Carmelite nun and died in Auschwitz [RELIGION, Oct. 19]. You noted that Stein's canonization by Pope John Paul II "strikes some as the hijacking of a martyr, the usurping of Jewish tragedy for Catholic purposes." But the flap over "who gets the martyr" is demeaning and embarrassing to the participants, and probably would appall Stein herself. There is no reason that Jews and Catholics alike cannot honor her life and achievements. In fact, it would be a golden opportunity to celebrate the new understanding between the two groups...