Word: lucullus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Emissaries from Rome. The battles known to history as "The Mithradatic Wars" went on for a quarter of a century. First Sulla, then Fimbria, and finally Lucullus smashed Mithradates' armies; the earlier massacre was repaid with the massacre of 300,000 of Mithradates' people. Mithradates flew for refuge to his son-in-law, King Tigranes of Armenia. A few years later, Tigranes marched forth at the head of 250,000 foot soldiers and 55,000 horsemen. To meet him went Rome's Lucullus with a mere handful of men-causing Tigranes to remark: "If these men have...
...first Symphony was played in Philadelphia in 1935, he was delighted. When people called his Violin Concerto unplayable, he shrugged and looked around until he found himself a fiddler who could play it. Last week in Princeton, N.J., Sessions' long (75 minutes) one-act opera, The Trial of Lucullus, got its first hearing in the East. The score was, as usual, pretty tough going, but at least nobody booed...
...opera represents a courtroom trial in the afterworld, in which the newly dead Roman general Lucullus pleads his case for admission to the Elysian Fields. The libretto, originally written as a radio play in 1936, is by Germany's Red poet Bert (ThreePenny Opera) Brecht, but its only ideological message is antimili-tarism (the Communists condemned the text in 1951 as too "unpolitical"). In a stunning setting of blocks and planes, Lucullus faces a jury of five pale shades: courtesan, teacher, baker, farmer and fishwife. His character witnesses are stone-relief figures from the frieze that decorates his tomb...
...desecration of alien gods, his famous cuisine. But he gets little sympathy from the jury until one witness tells how the general brought a cherry tree from Asia and planted it in the Apennines; then the jury retires to consider his case, and it looks like limbo for Lucullus...
Nevertheless, Lucullus was difficult. Composer Sessions explains that his music is "of line, rather than of detail," and since today's listeners are accustomed to focusing on detail, they find it hard to follow. Sessions has never pushed performances of Lucullus or of any other work. Says he: "I like my work too much to go to anyone with a score under my arm." Sessions is getting played in spite of this attitude: his lurid suite from The Black Maskers was performed this season by the Boston Symphony and is scheduled to be played at Tanglewood, where he will...