Word: lucullus
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...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...
...during these sections of the book that Bemelmans is at his best Where Potter's people were academicians. Bemelman's characters are active, alive in that continental atmosphere which the author catches so successfully. When Cucuface and the director of the Restaurant Lucullus tangle over the bill, the entire staff stops operating, breathlessly waiting to see how Cucuface will get out of the bill he has so gallantly picked up. He succeeds, the gallery nods appreciatively, and goes back to its duties...
Wailed one of his French critics: "He compared the shepherds of primitive Latium to the shepherds of Texas; the ancient Romans to the Boers; the Roman electoral body to the cosmopolitan demagogy of the United States; Rome itself to London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Milan; and Lucullus to Napoleon. He talks about capitalism, parliamentarism, imperialism, feminism . . . clubs, meetings, high life. . . . Cato is a landlord; M. Aemilius Scaurus a self-made man; Caesar a socialist leader, a Tammany boss...