Word: lear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Opera Berlin last week, "a triumph awaits you." As a prophet, Baritone Thomas Stewart was only half right. For their roles in Composer Giselher Klebe's opera Alkmene, a modern version of the Amphitryon legend, triumph awaited both Texas-born Stewart and his wife. Brooklyn-born Soprano Evelyn Lear. Raved the influential Frankfurter Algemeine: "What Evelyn Lear as Alkmene and Thomas Stewart as Jupiter attained belongs among the most glorious achievements in all Berlin opera...
Such unstinting European praise has greeted Soprano Lear and Baritone Stewart ever since they stopped knocking truitlessly on impresarios' doors in the U.S. four years ago. Schooled in borscht belt hotels and summer stock, they both won Fulbright scholarships and in 1957 entered Berlin's Hochschule für Musik. There they were discovered by Director Carl Ebert of the Berlin City Opera (predecessor of the Deutsche Opera Berlin), who signed them both for his company. Their debuts-Stewart's as Escamillo in Carmen in 1958. Lear's as the Composer in Ariadne the next year...
...quite believe it. The fact is, no one is really convinced that the tormented figures of modern drama have the stature of tragic heroes. The measure of that disbelief is to imagine Jocasta asking an audience to pay attention to Oedipus, or Cordelia to Lear. Try not paying attention to them...
...most of all. The rising middle class was not interested in the fall of princes and the death of kings. The romantic, ameliorative, democratic temper could abide neither the aristocratic pride of the tragic hero nor his implacable doom. Democracy has bred the kind of mind that believes King Lear would have been better off in a home for senior citizens...
...whites. Where in Genet's The Balcony men act out their dreams, in The Blacks they act out their nightmares as well. Often unbridled, sacrilegious, obscene, The Blacks is echoing too at times, with travestied ceremonies, Pirandellian illusion and reality, a sense of secular Black Masses and King Lear mock trials. A savage Negro assault that is also a Genet indictment, in places The Blacks indicts the savagery as well...