Word: potiphar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...week's end, when San Antonio concertgoers got to hear Joseph, most agreed. First they heard broad phrases in full orchestra, then passages, with the simple serenity of Mozart, depicting the character of Joseph. Later, in the temptation by Potiphar's wife, the music became sensuously dissonant, almost Oriental, reminding some listeners of Salome...
Traveler Cummings' afternoon at the home of the influential woman Communist known as Madame Potiphar-with a lean GPU agent appearing unexpectedly, and the hostess disappearing with "a hero of work" while her husband lectures to Cummings about the Cause-is a queer mixture of horror and humor in upper-crust Communist social life. The other episodes and scenes seem to have grown more impressive-the theater ("everywhere a mysterious sense of behaving, of housebrokenness,of watch-your-stepism"), the jail and the nightclubs, the Writers' Club and the literary receptions, the chronic indigestion, the perpetual enthusiasm...
Billy Sunday had made the choreography easy: he used to act out most of the parables in his sermons himself. Ruth Page had lifted three of her four episodes from Billy's own love stories from the Bible (Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar), updated them to Billy's own times, the 19205. As a blowsy Mrs. Potiphar, Ballerina Danilova brought the house down...
...slow-paced and philosophical that it seems static, despite the rapid development of its action. For it lacks the intense excitement of the scenes in which Joseph was cast into the pit, then sold into slavery (Young Joseph), or the intensity of the amorous scenes with Potiphar's wife (Joseph in Egypt). But while it is written with the deliberately pedantic humor in which Mann casts his cosmic irony, Joseph the Provider is so lucid that the magnificent flow of its prose may well be overlooked...
...Joseph books almost require a second reading. Readers will be likely to enjoy this big book only when they have looked back upon the immense pattern of the story, the array of characters-Joseph himself, his father, Jacob, his brothers, the scribes and stewards of Egypt, the courtly eunuch Potiphar, his sexually frustrated wife, the two dwarfs (in whom Mann personifies the principles of ineffectual goodness and potent evil), Pharaoh, the sermons of the bald-pated Egyptian priests, the astronomy, history, architecture, concepts of life & death-and the similarities and differences in the ancient legends of different people that Mann...