Word: paganisms
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Opening in Norma, Bellini's old and faded drama of the Druids. 30-year-old Soprano Callas lived up to her reputation. With her lissome figure handsomely clad in white and crimson, she looked almost too young and beautiful to be a pagan high priestess. She made a minimum of movement onstage, achieved precise dramatic effects by the tilt of her head or the angle of her body, but also electrified the crowd with slashing moments of violence, as when she confronted her faithless lover in Act II. Her voice ranged from flutely pianissimos that penetrated to the last...
...since they were married, baptism is a good excuse for a party. But they have to realize that this is one of the church's great sacraments . . . If a man is to become a bus driver, then he has instruction. A Christian should have the same. In a pagan world a man cannot use the church when he wants to without acknowledging his beliefs...
Through the 11th and 12th centuries, Burma's great empire at Pagan shone glamorously in its own context; in the 13th century, Tartary's Kublai Khan casually ordered it snuffed out. As casually as Kublai Khan, Red China's Liu Shao-chi recently marked counterrevolutionary Burma for conquest by renewed infiltration. Red China is already pulling Burma's Communist remnants back toward its border, to a "Yenan" redoubt where they can be reinforced and rearmed. Chou En-lai is pressing U Nu to sign a non-aggression pact that will help sanctify Red China...
...heart after all the thunder. The superb Sanctus calls for a tenor solo in which, by a dazzling piece of orchestration, the single, defenseless human voice is set off against the relentless clash of cymbals; and in the sweet, concluding Agnus Dei, there are chilling traces of jagged pagan rhythms (later used by Stravinsky). Conductor Munch tenderly and forcefully drove toward the end, spinning out the Amen with a loving final touch. A cathedral hush hung beneath the bare steel rafters; then the crowd leaped up and cheered...
Seldom since the pagan days of old had so many pilgrims come trudging to the shrine of the Goddess of Fortune where it sits in pleasant ruins not far from Rome. But Fortuna was out of luck last week...