Word: melodist
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Tongue-Lashing Aria. Menotti is a master melodist and an excellent hand at concocting workable dramatic episodes. Moment by moment, he has his audience believing in his action, even if it is laden with stereotypes. Each of his five scenes works to a strong, stirring climax. Michele drives the gawking neighbors out of his cold-water flat after Annina's vision. During a religious parade, he is beaten and shackled to a steel fence in symbolic martyrdom. He stabs his mistress after she accuses him of incestuous love for Annina. In a bleak subway station, he curses Annina when...
...happy happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new . . . −Ode on a Grecian...
Born in Paris, Cécile Chaminade started composing as a child, dedicated her first works (a group of nocturnes and "slumber songs") to her pet dogs and cat. She took lessons in composition from Benjamin Godard. Always a facile melodist, Chaminade soon rolled up a list of over 550 compositions, which stand in the same relation to Frederic Chopin as strawberry soda does to cognac. Many of them (The Flatterer, Pas des Amphores, La Zingara, Valse Caprice, Air de Ballet, etc.) got an international reputation...
...musical party line have put such living composers as Dmitri Shostakovich in & out of the official doghouse. In modernist days, some Soviet critics denounced Peter Ilich Tschaikowsky as a sentimental bourgeois. The Soviet line is now 100% melodic. Last week the Government sweetly celebrated the 100th anniversary of Melodist Tschaikowsky's birth...
...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...