Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...winking." Thus while most Viennese conductors play down the rich orchestral part for the sake of the singers, Bernstein gave it new prominence, urging it on by jumping into the air and dancing on the podium to Strauss's three-quarter rhythms. And while he captured the elegiac bittersweetness that is at the very heart of the autumnal work, he freed it of the sentimental encrustations that Strauss never intended; as a result it was sharper, livelier, nobler...
Instead of the rolling rifle volleys and guttural drums that accompanied the President's obsequies, Martin Luther King's funeral in Atlanta was counterpointed by resonant spirituals and the elegiac toll of mourning bells. The difference was essentially that between black and white, Baptist and Catholic, soul and suzerainty. There were the predictable and publicized responses-the Academy Awards were postponed so that Negro entertainers could attend the funeral; baseball's major leagues likewise delayed their opening day-and a degree of political grandstanding. But the tributes rendered last week to King nonetheless added...
...Philharmonic-under Harris' unpracticed baton-the mainspring that should have wound the work into a powerful coil of tension remained slack. Only the opening section of the 20-minute piece, with its urgent string passages set off against barking brass, was fully effective. In the second section, an elegiac fugue turned slowly on itself, then began to meander...
...Elegiac Worst. With the onset of World War II, "the smouldering heart, the seamless brow" of the youthful Day-Lewis began a slow, often painful search for order-a quest that some critics fear may have put his "less Dionysiac" verse at the Establishment's doorstep. Yet the best of his lyrical and narrative poems display a trim, controlled power...
Unfortunately, elegiac verse, seemingly a ceremonial necessity for poets laureate, does not seem to be his forte. His unofficial effort on the death of Winston Churchill laments that "the route was difficult, and the peak remote" for "the young fox-haired firebrand of debate." That verse won the Times Literary Supplement's nomination for 1965's worst poem. Several years ago, however, Day-Lewis took a step that should prove enormously helpful. As he relates in his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), he refuses to subscribe to a press-clipping service...