Word: melodist
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Weinstock's fluently expressed prejudices will give a jolt or two to dyed-in-tradition music-lovers. For them Chopin is "the most truly original of all composers"; bob-haired, ecclesiastic Liszt "the most tremendous musical failure of the 19th Century." Biggest jolt: a cool reference to sentimental Melodist Tschaikowsky as "the greatest symphonist of the 19th Century-after Beethoven." Of such critical jabs, close-collaborating Authors Brockway & Weinstock say simply: "If they start a controversy . . . so much the better. We think the future will bear them...
Composer Menotti is not worried about opera's future. Chief troubles with it nowadays, he feels, are that its theatres are too big, its language foreign, its settings antiquated. A simple melodist in his own music, Menotti dismisses most modernists as bad craftsmen, thinks the salvation of music lies in a return to intelligible musical language. U. S. composers, he thinks, are under an unfair handicap: "You still want foreign names; that's one thing that has been in my favor." About his operatic preoccupation with feminine foibles, 27-year-old Menotti explains: "Women, to fascinate men, must...