Word: premi
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Wondrous Ladder. The fierce critical dispute last week concerned the work of the late Arnold Schoenberg, a Viennese composer whose atonal music still stirs controversy ten years after his death. This time the argument started at Vienna's famed Konzerthaus after the world première of a little-remembered Schoenberg work-a fragmentary, 45-minute oratorio, Jacob's Ladder. Schoenberg wrote the text for his oratorio in 1915, started to write the music but was interrupted by World War I service in the Austrian army. He abandoned the score for more than 20 years, returned...
Last week, following the première of Elegy for Young Lovers, Henze took to his bed with a high fever. "It's the anticlimax he suffers after each première," reported his secretary. "Every time, he thinks he has made it, and then his sensitive nature tells...
...première in Paris, advance publicity whetted popular interest in Romeo and Juliet, and for once a new work by Berlioz became an overnight success. ("Come, dears," wrote a society columnist. "You will hear wonderful things.") But there were grumblings even then that Romeo and Juliet was a curious hybrid-neither symphony nor oratorio nor opera. What Berlioz was aiming for was a new amalgam of symphony and opera in which vocal solos, choral and instrumental passages were mixed in loosely linked episodes. In Berlioz' musical shorthand, some moments of highest passion-the passages between Romeo and Juliet...
Then Gleason recalled the post-première celebration and the victorious return to his hotel ("I opened the window to look out and see if it was still snowing, and they had the nets up"). His conclusion: "This isn't a requiem for a heavyweight. I'm coming back next week. I don't know what we're going to do, but tune in on the next chapter, because this might be the greatest soapless soap opera you've ever seen...
...pages of the world's worst trilogy," he quit his last odd job-Western Union messenger-three years ago to become a playwright. His first effort, The Zoo Story, an affecting work about the failure of communication between a lonely outcast and a smug square, had its première in Berlin, where it was hailed as "the Götterdämmerung of the gutter." Albee has since turned out four more one-act works, is currently working up from one-acters toward full-length drama by writing a two-act play that seems unlikely ever to appear...