Word: eunuch
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...18th-Century London was Italian opera. Periwigged courtiers, who could not understand a word of it, raised their lace cuffs to applaud the ornate trilling of swivel-voiced prima donnas. Fashionable composers like Handel had to write their librettos in Italian. The Caruso of the period was the Italian eunuch-Francesco Bernardi Senesino, whose misfortunate voice earned fabulous sums at London's Royal Academy of Music. Lustier London wits like Henry Fielding began poking fun at this artificial art, inveighed against London's "wanton, affected fondness for foreign musick," with its "squeaking recitatives, paltry Eunuchs . . . and trills...
...seems to be all too easy to arouse prejudice and passion against the people who so long ago struggled out of the ford of the Jabbok to meet Esau, the hairy man. . . .* Today the Jew in certain areas is a political eunuch, a social outcast, to be dragged down like...
Latest Graves novel of Rome's slow fall, Count Belisarius, does not quite measure up to these, largely because Belisarius is noble, dull, honest and courageous, where bumbling old Claudius was gnarled with humanness. Purporting to be the work of Eugenius, educated eunuch and slave of Belisarius' wife, it is laid in Justinian's reign, tells the story of Justinian's one capable general. Belisarius defeats the Persians, takes Carthage, conquers Italy, marries a shrewd, level-headed prostitute, Antonina, is blinded by Justinian, who fears him as a rival...
...there was Chee-Chee, the musicomedy made from Charles Pettit's witty, bawdy Son of the Grand Eunuch, which Lew Fields produced in 1928. Lew Fields's son Herb, who wrote the books of several of their early hits, was sold on the Son of the Grand Eunuch, talked Hart into liking it, the two of them talked Herb's father, all three talked Rodgers. Rodgers believes it had the best score he ever wrote, that what killed it was the idea itself: "You just can't talk about castration all evening...
...nearing the age of 75, he retired. As head of a news-gathering agency whose 1,400 newspaper members make it one of the two greatest in the world, Frank Noyes for 38 years had carefully avoided expressing opinions on public questions. "Circumstances compel me to be an intellectual eunuch," he explained...