Word: puccini
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When David Henry Hwang was a student at Stanford University, he and fellow residents of the "Asian-American theme dorm" used to refer derisively to any female peer who seemed overly deferential, too traditionally feminine, as "doing a Butterfly." Hwang, for one, had no actual complaint against Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. In fact, he had never seen or even heard it. But what he had gleaned of the plot -- about a Japanese girl who kills herself for love of a faithless American sailor -- summed up for him many of the stereotypes Westerners imposed on Orientals...
...rather go out and buy that new Kiri Te Kanawa CD than open up this month's phone bill. We'll stay home to watch a Live from the Met broadcast instead of taking our chances on the new Arnold Schwarzenegger film. And even our beloved Mozart, Wagner and Puccini LP's are showing severe wear and tear...
...Russell was made for Aria. The music is Nessun dorma from Puccini's Turandot; the images are the last frenetic dreams of a dying woman. Ancient astral priests dress her for a mysterious ritual: paint on her body, diamonds on the soles of her feet, finally a branding iron pressed to her lips. A rude flash, and we see the scene of a car accident. The jewels are mortal wounds, the priests surgeons, the vision one of hope and fear for the unknown world that follows death. Visually, Russell's sequence is pitched at see above high- see. Emotionally...
...modern film style, Aria blends two old forms: classical opera and the silent film. Both discovered unique languages to convey emotions; both eschewed irony for intensity; both declined in the 1920s -- opera with Puccini's death, silent movies with the coming of sound. So a headlong romantic like Ken Russell will embrace opera on film like a first, lost love. For him, opera is performed at peak volume because the feelings it surveys are big and deep. Matters of lust and death are too important to be spoken; they must be sung, shouted, thundered, wept -- and shown, in all their...
...panderer to the basest melodic cravings of the mass audience, hammering home a few repetitive themes amid overblown orchestral climaxes and distracting technological gimmickry. His scores have been derided as derivative and too dependent on pastiche -- meretricious parrotings of his Broadway betters (Rodgers) and his operatic antecedents (Puccini...