Word: macbeths
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...always against the sort of teaching that insisted upon minute parsing of every line of Shakespeare. The analytical method of teaching Shakespeare's plays was carried to such extremes that one college class reached the year's end without ever getting past the fourth act of Macbeth...
Coming back to reunion the following year, a student shook his professor's hand and said: "I got more out of that course in Shakespeare than out of any other. . . . What a wonderful play Macbeth was. I've" always wondered how it came out." Neither Cross nor Canby would have anything to do with such endless exegesis ot an author, and they managed gradually to impress their more liberal views on the Yale faculty as a whole...
Lady of Mzensk. One mystery Biographer Seroff's book goes a long way toward solving is the maze of Slavic ideological brainwork that lay behind the sensational blacklisting of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the District of Mzensk in 1936. The close connection in the Soviet mind between musical and political technique will probably never be completely fathomed by non-Russians. But looked at by Russians, the downfall of Lady Macbeth had a certain logic about...
...Lady Macbeth was a satire against the bourgeoisie, but the musical language in which this satire was expressed was the international jargon of dissonance known to postwar Europe from Paris to Moscow as "modern music." That Hitler was, at the same time, castigating modern music as "musical bolshevism" bothered the bolshevik theorists not a whit. To them it was "bourgeois formalism...
...modern music was unquestionably international inherently contrary to the soothing national strains of Russian folk music. In 1936 Joseph Stalin, already preparing for his celebrated purge of the old bolsheviks, was carving Russia a new nationalistic policy. In the eyes of Moscow's word-raddled musical theorists, Lady Macbeth of the District of Mzensk was an old-bolshevik opera...