Word: enigma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...understand that legacy, by which death ceased to be an enigma and became, not a lament for what might have been, but a hope for what...
...ways of life clear and uncommonly affecting. Take Dorsey, for example. He combines a holy man's zeal, a performer's ego and a revered older man's self-contentment, and the film's portrait of him becomes a little essay on the patriarch as enigma. Or consider Delois Barrett Campbell. Onstage she is a shatteringly forceful singer. Off stage she is married to the minister of a humble church who has trouble understanding the ambition that must lie behind a talent as large as hers. Like any wife whose career has outstripped her husband...
...fresh, distinctive style, this account refutes much previous speculation about the great composer's life and music, replacing it with scholarship and practical judgement. Much of the enjoyment in reading the biography derives from its flexible approach and its lack of a didactic single answer to the enigma. Hildesheimer freely admits that his work is only a contribution to the "concert of diverse voices," yet he hopes to alter that concert with his voice. He considers "the reader's power of imagination and willingness to imagine" an integral requisite for the appreciation of his discussion...
...connoisseurs of enigma, there is A Dead Soldier by an unknown Neapolitan hand (all attributions having failed so far), which inspired Manet's Dead Toreador. The painting is a link between Caravaggio's shadow-theater and, through Salvator Rosa, the world of 19th century romanticism. It shows a young man in half-armor lying stiff and composed on the floor of a cave (some mountain charnel-house, perhaps) surrounded by rainy twilight and the glimmer of bones, with a curl of smoke still issuing from an extinguished votive lamp. A vanitas? A more personal lamentation? Impossible...
...never confirmed, and he accepted Bayreuth's invitation to lead Wagner's Christian allegory, Parsifal, in an opera house that, during the Hitler years, was a citadel of Nazism. "I wanted to go to Bayreuth," he explains, "because the only way I know to solve the enigma of Wagner's being a genius and an anti-Semite is to get as close to it as possible...