Word: missolonghi
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...months before he died of fever in Missolonghi in western Greece, broken and legendary at 36, George Gordon, Lord Byron, staged an elaborate practical joke on a friend. Knowing that a recent earthquake had frightened the friend badly, Byron sent fifty men into the basement of the house where they were staying, with instructions to jump up and down. Meanwhile, other men were dispatched to roll cannonballs back and forth across the upstairs rooms. The friend fled the shuddering house, terrified...
...subject's tempestuous 36 years. Jack Larson's static libretto focuses in flashback on Byron's eccentric amatory escapades; the action is framed by the efforts of Byron's friends to win him a place in Poets' Corner. Of his more dramatic travels, battles and death at Missolonghi there is scarcely a word. Such a conception might have worked had Thomson been a composer of passion and power, had he been able to write music commensurate with Byron's words and deeds -- had he been, in short, the Verdi of Otello or the Berg of Wozzeck. But he wasn...
Byron died in 1824 of a fever, on a mud flat called Missolonghi, before he could do any fighting but not before most of his treasure had disappeared. His death, otherwise futile, stimulated English interest in the war. Two large bond issues were floated to help the Greeks, the proceeds of which were embezzled in London and stolen in Greece...
...poet Swinburne, who in real life had curious difficulties with the opposite sex, is killed while adventuring in the royal seraglio. The scandal is smoothed over, however, partly because of the good feeling left by the fervently pro-Moorish writings of Lord Byron, who does not die at Missolonghi in 1824, according to Guedalla, but lives on in Granada until...
Byron also survives his Missolonghi fever in a wicked imagining by Harold Nicholson, who in his essay has the poet fumble on till 1854-as nothing less than King George I of Greece, "an obese little man descending the steps of the Crystal Palace on his wooden leg, supporting himself on his famous umbrella, and clasping a huge red handkerchief in the other hand." The wooden leg has replaced the clubfoot of Byron's dashing early years, which the poet-King lost, along with all vestiges of poetic vision, while fighting ineptly against the Turks near Lepanto...