Word: gothic
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...about himself than that he is doomed-why bother? MURIEL MONTEKIO New York City Sir: The attack by Alfred Kazin is off the mark. All creative artists use exaggeration as a tool. This is as true of a Beethoven symphony as of the distorted figure of a Gothic saint as of the distorted pointing finger of Matthias Grunewald. The literary artist also by necessity must choose the exaggerated and often grisly side, especially the dramatist. Characters like incestuous Oedipus or child-murdering Medea are as "immoral" as the deplored modern ones, and so, for that matter, are Macbeth or Hamlet...
Puritani takes place in Cromwell's England, where the Cavalier hero daringly dupes the Roundheads, but in the process is forced to abandon his betrothed, Elvira, who goes insane. Soprano Sutherland's triumph last week was that she made her audience overlook the opera's gothic absurdities and focus on its moments of real beauty, including Elvira's pre-wedding aria, "Son vergin vezzosa," and her splendid "Qui la voce sua soave," which introduces a mad scene every bit as effective as the more famous one in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Her voice...
...month-long program: Mikhail Glinka's Russian and Ludmilla, a less well-known but far better work than Glinka's only other opera, A Life for the Tsar, Gustav Mahler's massive oratorio, Das Lied von der Erde. to be played in the ancient Gothic St. Vitus Cathedral; the first performance outside Russia of Dmitry Shostakovich's new Concerto lor Violoncello...
...naturally to the Southern school of U.S. writers of which Virginia's William Styron is an unevenly talented member. Characteristically, most Southern writers equate the post-bellum fate of their region with the universal fate of man, and identify decline with tragedy. Amid romanticized passivity, violence erupts in Gothic melodramas of rape, murder and madness. Among the few exceptions: some of William Faulkner's Negroes, who achieve the dignity of stoic endurance. Unfortunately, the passion seems to be draining out of this school; the magnolias are all too frequently stained with tired blood...
...sometimes morbidly haunted path? Like the good psychological determinist he is, Author Fiedler feels that it all began in the womb of English letters some two centuries ago. Pioneering American novelists had two English models-the sentimental novel of love embodied in Richardson's Clarissa and the gothic novel of crumbling castles and mental phantoms invented by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto). Eventually housewives and what Hawthorne called "female scribblers" took over the sentimental novel; as a romantic fantasy it has paced U.S. bestseller lists ever since. When Charles Brockden Brown, a graceless but serious 18th century writer...