Word: queenly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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NOTEBOOK begins with poems to his daughter Harriet--throughout he invokes her, age 9, 10 1/2, 11, for what she can be, love, and know beyond him--"God as seaslug, God a queen with forty servants, God. . .she gave up--things whirl in the chainsaw bite of whatever squares the universe by name and number." Harriet--outside, in life, sometimes is able to see through "the fog" which her father like "the first philosopher. . .trying to pick up a car key clumsily opaques with his headlights." Harriet appears frequently in the poems--to clarify, identify, be, to be hoped...
Many years ago, when I was 17 or 18, living in China, my father introduced me to books of Vladimir Sirin, which was Nabokov's pseudonym at that time. The first books that I read were The Luzhin Defence; King, Queen, Knave; Invitation to an Execution and some delightful short stories written in Russian. I kept all of his books for years, reading them over and over until they resembled worn-out library books; unfortunately, I lost them in a fire during the war in Manila...
Though the Staatsoper has regained much of its prewar luster, it is no longer the unquestioned queen of the world's opera houses. Acoustically, the theater itself is a marvel. Yet even Vienna's chauvinistic critics will concede that artistic standards at New York's Met and Milan's La Scala are at least as high. More exciting days, though, may be ahead. Next year Bernstein and the Viennese stage director Otto Schenk will collaborate on a new production of Fidelio. Also scheduled are expensively mounted revivals of Verdi's Macbeth, Gluck's Iphig...
Better Than Brahms? So, alas, are most of the other antiquities performed this month at Butler's second annual Festival of Romantic Music. The six-day exercise in musical archaeology opened with the lushly sentimental overture to The May Queen, a cantata by the English composer William Sterndale Bennett. His fellow Victorians regarded him as better than Brahms. Today he is one of the forgotten men of English music. The years have been equally hard on other romantics on the Butler program. Belgium's Henri Vieuxtemps was perhaps the greatest violinist of his day, but until Cellist Jascha...
Sheila Hart (Phaedra) speaks with bewildered and frightened passion as the queen who lusts for her son Hippolytus. She commands such respect with each word that her accusingly harsh "Wicked!" to her Nurse seems to damn her for eternity. When she cries "Women, stop speaking!", they dare not speak. And when she predicts her fate, Death!", I feared for her very existence. Miss Hart overcome the awkward hand gestures devised by the director by using her face and the slightest turn of her head to convey the deepest emotion...