Word: melodrama
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Igor Stravinsky's attempt to describe his Persephone was not too illuminating: "A nose," he said, "is not manufactured; a nose just is. Thus, too, my art." In the case of Persephone, the nose is neither ballet nor oratorio nor melodrama. A curiously hybrid work, it was first performed by the dancer Ida Rubinstein in 1934 and calls for a tenor, a chorus and full orchestra, and a leading lady who declaims a French text by André Gide while she dances. Persephone's score ranks with Stravinsky's most tautly constructed music-in his best neoclassic...
...rainy, unpromising greyness surrounds the short stories of Delmore Schwartz, as it does the fiction of other writers who find the literary quarterlies their most congenial homes. One reason for the quarterly drear seems to be an extreme distrust of the dramatic, arising partly from squeamishness about melodrama, that greatest of sins against artistic sophistication. Another is the honest awareness of serious men that the cavalry rarely does charge into ordinary lives. One might suspect that Schwartz and his colleagues had all been invited to tea by John Marcher-the hero of Henry James's The Beast...
...first glance to be pure theater, yet they provide a kind of climax to the show. The Renaissance master, having unlocked the classic secrets of the human face and figure, could now take liberties with nature. It is Bernini's triumph that the masks are mood rather than melodrama; there is violence here, but no violation of the sculptor...
...Kitchen. Too many cooks cannot spoil this spluttering slumgullion of socialism and melodrama, heated to a rolling boil by British Playwright Arnold Wesker...
...Kitchen. Too many cooks cannot spoil this spluttering slumgullion of socialism and melodrama, heated to a rolling boil by British Playwright Arnold Wesker...