Word: lyricisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...COMPLETE LYRICS OF COLE PORTER; Knopf; 354 pages; $30 THE LYRICS OF NOëL COWARD; Overlook Press; 418 pages; $25 "Strange how potent cheap music is," wrote Noël Coward about one of his own songs. He was partly right: the melody and rhythm proved irresistible, but the lyric ("Some day I'll find you,/ Moonlight behind you") provided the real power. In an enduring song, notes beguile the ear; words build a home in the mind...
...historians. He demonstrates such courage and self-denial: The Discoverers is chock-full of particulars and laced with sobering facts. We see how the botanist Linnaeus originated the idea of species by looking at the sex organs of plants (and how he inspired Charles Darwin's grandfather to write lyric poems about plants' amours). We learn how fastidious anatomists preserved for centuries their ignorance about the true form of the human body by relegating the unsavory dissection to barber-surgeons, while they read about the body in books...
Penderecki has written two operas on religious subjects: The Devils of Loudun (1969) and Paradise Lost (1978), which the composer has called a Sacra Rappresentazione rather than a conventional opera. Paradise Lost, commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, was the victim of a turgid production that obscured the work's many beauties. Messiaen's Saint François-which resembles no other work in the operatic literature as much as it resembles Paradise Lost in its static, quasi-oratorio quality- is more fortunate all around...
...subclass of their own. They are incomplete notes. Who could deduce from Hockney's brisk studies for the mechanical bird in Le Rossignol, for instance, the surprise of its actual intrusion on the stage of the Met, a blazing vermilion-and-gilt apparition in that gauzy, lyric ambiance of K'ang-Hsi porcelain blue? The drawing just looks like a canary on a toy red cart. Yet ingenuity can bridge many gaps, and Hockney is nothing if not ingenious...
Literature that yearns toward the condition of music provides a more promising line of inquiry. Burgess explores lyric verse, the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the verbal polyphony of James Joyce. He envisions quasimusical novels built on principles of "structuralism, a liberation from marketplace meanings," and offers two of his own, M/Fand Napoleon Symphony, as exhibits...