Word: meltzer
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Dates: during 1925-1925
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Critic Charles Henry Meltzer was last week quoted in Musical America on the perenniel topic of opera in English. Said Critic Meltzer...
...Critic Meltzer thereupon presented specimens of operas which he has translated into English for the Edith Rockefeller McCormick edition of modern librettos, now being issued at the expense of the famed Chicago patroness of music...
...translations of Meltzer were adept, painstaking, vigorous; they paraphrased the originals as closely as it is possible for the verse of one country to paraphrase that of another. Nevertheless, they were abominable poetry Some of the lines possessed a certain insipid grace; far more of them had the stilted, fustian air that can only be characterized by the adjective "operatic." Such lines as "Naught my sweetheart from me shall sunder," "Thou'dst best beware," "I know not what I'm saying or what I'm doing" were hackneyed when Alfred Lord Tennyson was a litle boy in Lincolnshire and completely...
...librettos. Yet U. S. audiences, hearing opera in French, German, Russian, Italian, care little. They, sensitive to poetry though unlearned in languages, can taste in the language of imagination the exquisite words which should properly accompany exquisite music. Little desiring opera in English, these operagoers read with indignation Critic Meltzer's plea, looked with scorn upon his competent translations...