Word: ode
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...have walk-on parts for real celebrities. Erich Segal is an able practitioner of glitz lit. As a classics scholar (he has taught at Harvard, Yale and Princeton), he understands that readers never tire of seeing the proud and the privileged lowered by fate. Love Story, his bittersweet ode to the Ivy League, established him as the preppies' Pindar. The Class is his bid to be their Homer...
Next stop is Strasbourg, where Reagan is to deliver the keynote speech on V- E day before the European Parliament. In a lyrical ode to friendship and freedom, he plans to celebrate the survival and triumph of democracy in Western Europe after it was almost snuffed out during World War II. Strasbourg, however, is not without its own petty imbroglios. Reagan was initially invited to lunch by French President Francois Mitterrand, but when the European Parliament's president, Pierre Pflimlin, a longtime opponent of Mitterrand's Socialists, issued Reagan an official counterinvitation, a miffed Mitterrand withdrew...
...charm and wit who graced vaudeville in the pre-World War I era, silent films and later talkies, but mostly the Broadway stage, where she specialized from 1917 to 1954 in the highly varnished comedies of bad manners and good breeding (The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, 1925; Biography, 1932; Ode to Liberty, 1934) in which the characters misbehave in venomous, perfectly timed epigrams; in San Francisco...
...once again asserted itself over the background clamor. Beginning with an hysterical "Witchbusters" sequence, the second act launches into a string of Murrayisms worthy of the Man-of-the-Year. From there, the plot meanders down to hell for a breakdancing scene, then back on high, first for lustful ode from Alexis, and then for a Last-Judgement-as-beauty-contest scene to distinguish the true sinners and get the whole cast in tights. The crowd is impressed enough to forget to take center stage...
...basically breezy 1940s tonality, which is leavened by a few more recent technical advances. In An American Oratorio, Rorem's style works effectively with gentle poems like Poe's To Helen, but it misses the force and majesty of Crane's bitter War Is Kind or Lazarus' noble ode to the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus. The reach of the texts generally exceeds the composer's grasp. "The music was written in Nantucket during July of 1983," Rorem explains in a program note. "That July, as it happens, contained a houseful of guests; like 18th century female novelists...