Word: operas
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...legendary Eva Peron, wife of Argentina's great dictator and unofficial queen of the masses, is one of history's most elusive figures, lending herself more easily to pop-opera deification than standard biography. Tomas Eloy Martinez's absorbing and intricate new novel, Santa Evita, uses so many narrative tricks to both remedy and explore this problem that it almost defies description...
...story, but a net that each person weaves without knowing the overall pattern." Martinez realizes that the work of other artists who have attempted to capture Evita is part of this patchwork, and he mentions fellow Argentinean writers Rodolfo Walsh and Jorge Luis Borges frequently. He even discusses the opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, calling it precisely the simplification he wishes to avoid: "a sing-along article out of selections from the Reader's Digest...
Ballet and opera, now further removed than Shakespeare from popular appreciation, actually took much longer to ascend to the ranks of "high culture." Opera actually took root in very few countries. Audiences had difficulty accepting dialogue in song, much the trouble some audiences have with Evita. But where opera and ballet were accepted, they were accepted by the masses as popular culture. Opera and ballet were not "high culture...
More than that, western Europe considered those in ballet and opera to be morally bankrupt. The upper classes did frequent this entertainment, but the entertainment was not considered refined or aristocratic by any means. In fact, the dancers and singers were mostly very poor young men and women of the lower classes enticed by money. But there was an ethical draw-back: the Church refused to marry or bury actors and dancers. Thus the frequency of early ballerinas that entered nunneries to repent in their later years. In America, ballet was considered immoral up to the 20th century. Only...
...with the sheer artificiality of art is likely to have difficulties with Giambattista Tiepolo, the greatest Italian painter--and one of the three or four chief European ones--of the 18th century. Though based on intensive study of the human body, his work is about as realistic as grand opera. Enter it, and you're inducted into a majestic yet unpredictable fantasy land. It is full of soaring and twisting space, transparency and delicious shot-silk color--a place dedicated to the imagination and filled with idealized personages from history, myth and fable. It is by turns sublime, witty...