Word: macbeths
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Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth is a top modern opera...
...another candidate must be added to that list: Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which resurfaced last week in San Francisco. The composer's second and last opera - his first was the bitingly satirical The Nose (1928), based on a story by Gogol - has had a checkered history. Completed in 1932, hailed as a major achievement at its premiere in 1934, condemned by Stalin in 1936 and sanitized 20 years later as Katerina Ismailova, the opera electrified its first audiences in both Russia and the West with its sexual frankness. One early critic, referring to the lascivious...
...already completed ten of the 15 symphonies he was eventually to write. But as a rule, first impulses tend to be more vital and visceral: Hindemith's first version of Cardillac, for example, or Verdi's original Don Carlos. The same is true of Lady Macbeth. As staged by the enterprising San Francisco Opera, which gave Katerina Ismailova its U.S. premiere in 1964, Lady Macbeth showed a power and raw urgency that was weakened by its later revision...
...from the Reagan budget office, has warned against premature celebrations. Acknowledging his mandate to trim the department's budget from $14.8 billion to $13.1 billion for the 1983 fiscal year, Bell announced recently that some of the new reductions would be in student loans. "To borrow a line from Macbeth, 'We have scotched the snake but not killed it,'" he reportedly told financial aid administrators in August...
...pain, anguish and futile passion imagined by their authors. Why, for one instance, shouldn't King Lear be seen in some truly golden retirement years, preferably in an adults-only community? And why not a tale in which Othello and Desdemona kiss and make up? Imagine Lady Macbeth joining the Gray Ladies. Or Molly Bloom enrolling in needlepoint class. Or Sir Clifford Chatterley making a successful pilgrimage to Lourdes...