Word: motif
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...entertainment for several odd hundred people. To aftain that end all the necessary seriousness of rehearsals and first performances must be dropped when the show gets under way. To be gay and light and charming any musical production must be spontaneous, or apparently so. For plot and lines and motif mean little or nothing when set to music and fast dancing steps. The four principals in "The School for Seandal" have not hampered their abilities at burlesque with any painful amateurish stage consclousness. To Messrs, Grossman, Crosby, Morgan, and Rammum we are indebted for an enjoyable evening...
That hoary old motif of musical revue, the lie-detector, reappears in the edition of "Artists and Models" now current at the Majestic, this time in the guise of a mysterious chamber lined with ancient plates, one of which falls whenever a lie is told. It would be interesting to test that room by discussing last night's show inside it. The strong suspicion is that almost every favorable comment would be drowned by the crash of shattering china...
Puppets. Frances Lightner has concocted a ragged play about rag dolls, human and otherwise. Into a rather unusual setting of a marionette theater on Mulberry Street, Manhattan, the playwright plucks somewhat forcibly at a snatch of the Pagliacci motif...
...works, guaranteed to irritate unaccustomed ears. A new composer of unquestioned merit was also brought to light oh this occasion. He is Alexander von Zemlinsky, an Austro-Czecho-Slovakian. His Third, or "Lyric", Symphony was performed; its seven long movements are all built around a single leading motif: the theme of "a man bent on conquest and adventure, to whom love is but an episode in a life of combat and struggle." Zemlinsky used a baritone voice and many kettledrums to bring home with emphasis his dominant idea...
...preparing the play for the opera stage, Giordano was obliged to delete parts of the libretto. The motif appears in the first act and is elaborated into an octette in the third act when Gianetto's plot is perfected. In this way a passage which occupied 15 minutes in the drama is reduced to four minutes in the opera, because all the characters speak at once. The result must be striking if not effective. As yet no one is said to have heard the music except Giordano's wife. But the combined popularity of La Cena della Beffe...