Word: moravians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jenufa 's slow recognition in the U.S. bears coincidental resemblance to its composer's career. If ever there was a late bloomer, it was Janáček. A Moravian, he was professor of composition but wrote little of consequence himself before he was 40. He completed Jenufa in 1903 when he was 49. It received its "overnight" success a dozen years later. He wrote several other operas, including From the House of the Dead, which is almost a speculation on Dostoyevsky's novel, and The Makropoulos Affair, a fantastic showpiece for orchestra...
Rimmed World. Though it can be placed well enough among turn-of-the-century verismo works, Jenufa is an elusive opera in some ways. The setting is a Moravian village, and the composer knew its inhabitants with detachment and compassion. He creates no heroes, but a world of people working, flirting, taking naps, worrying about saving face or avoiding the draft. The plot, however, concerns deadly primal emotions: love, jealousy and ambition. Jenufa is pregnant by števa, a wastrel who chases every girl in town. Jenufa still hopes to catch him, but her world is invisibly rimmed...
Jesuit achievements were as often secular as spiritual. French Jesuit Jacques Marquette paddled down the Mississippi in the first European expedition to explore that river. Brother Jiri Kamel, a Moravian botanist at the Jesuits' College of Manila in the 17th century, gave Europe the camellia. A German mathematician and astronomer of the Society of Jesus, Christoph Klau, contributed to the Gregorian calendar and gave his Latinized name, Clavius, to a lunar crater that he discovered...
...affords them small pleasure. But they give themselves to different men in the doomed hope that they will find their identity at the point where all the lines of male force intersect. Even motherhood fails to bring Moravian women alive. Mirrors appear again and again, mocking the ladies who stand be fore them for being less real than their reflections. In Moravia's world, the furniture has more personality than the people who sit upon...
...finally, calls to accounting of the lives of people who have wept only in their dreams. "Somebody knocked at the door and a terrible voice cried 'Telegram!' " Thus ends a story ironically titled Paradise. Dante could draw another circle of hell from the slump of the Moravian woman - stifling her yawn, stifling her scream -as she shuffles to answer...