Word: jamesian
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...young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite." Thus Henry James tried to cut through the psychological brambles of his own Wings of the Dove. Last week Manhattan operagoers saw an attempt to render the Jamesian complexities in song: the New York City Opera première of Composer Douglas Moore's The Wings of the Dove...
...novel gets much of its quality from the convoluted Jamesian style, which is hardly suited to song. Still, Composer Moore ( The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Ballad of Baby Doe) was fascinated by the story of a young Englishwoman who urges her penniless lover to start a flirtation with an ailing American heiress, hoping that the heiress, who is compared in the story to a dove, will soon die and leave him rich and free. In stripping the story to the operatic bone, Moore and Librettist Ethan Aver changed the name of the scheming suitor from Merton Densher to Miles...
...catch the Jamesian spirit, Composer Moore, 68, wrote a score that has none of the folksy American flavor of Baby Doe or Daniel Webster. It surges forward with a propulsive flow that rarely stops for set pieces or arias. The opera is also highly melodic, most effectively in Milly's Dove Song, which soars over ribbons of strings, and in a fine female duet ("He will, he must He'll be coming back" ) toward the end. For all that, Wings of the Dove suffers from a case of dramatic anemia. Composer Moore does his best to summon drama...
...particular, the score adheres, if anything, somewhat too closely to the text: the persons of a Jamesian narrator remains, and a gentleman in Victorian evening dress is required to deliver a dull and quite uncalled-for prologue, and then to disappear abruptly and permanently. A bit upsetting, that...
This precise, intelligent and slightly bloodless book is essentially a novel of sensibility on the classic Jamesian theme of American innocence and European experience. Its internal drama-dramatically understated-is a victory and defeat of the heart: the love of an American couple for France and their frustrated yearnings to be loved in return by some French people they get to know...