Word: harlotization
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...month ago I attacked the student opera The Cursed Dauncers for its facile use of medieval setting. The Conversion of Saint Pelagia, the Harlot, by undergraduates David Cole and Ronald Perera deserves to be attacked on the same grounds, but much more harshly. If the first opera had a plot with only half a dramatic issue, this one side-steps cheaply a powerful moral question. If the Daunsers exerted a shallow dramatic impact, this opera is simply not a drama, and its production made it all the more a sham...
...moral status of the prostitute is a natural issue for modern questioning of traditional ethics. Christianity has taken a dramatic position on this issue, giving no quarter to sins brought on by the harlot, yet offering her soul communal redemption. But in by-passing the powerful intellectual and emotional conflicts posed by the Church's stand, Cole and Perera give Saint Pelagia its sorry artistic impotence...
...Anne Schoeder made Pelagia even less a harlot, more a whimpering school-girl. Her stooped posture forced her to sing virtually through her nose and to detach each note from the next. Richard Conrad, as Nonnus, showed the best voice, but both his acting and singing were monotonous. His colleague Gerhard (Thomas Walker) lacked vocal control and similarly, Carolyn Kimball's motion between registers was very awkward...
...Lowell House Musical Society has announced that its annual spring operatic production this year will be a departure from precedent: an original opera written especially for the Society by undergraduates. Called The Conversion of Saint Pelagia, the Harlot, the opera was composed by Roland C. Perera '63 with a libretto by David S. Cole '63. It will be performed in Agassiz...
Robert D. Swezey, Jr. '62-3, the producer, described the work as a "chamber opera" with five singing roles and ten solo instruments in the orchestra. Cole's libretto represents a fusion of historical material on two fourth century saints, one of whom was a harlot before she was converted...