Word: rebirth
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...story of the rebirth of the music drama that of the miscarriage of tragedy?" Leo Schrade asked at his third Norton lecture last night. Laying strict limitations on both forms, he called tragedy, an artistic medium quite distinct from other forms of drama with ideas peculiar to it, particularly the idea of fate. On this basis he refused to call medieval passion plays music drama and qualified the character of tragedy in Monteverdi's operas...
Schrade claimed that the force behind the rebirth of music drama was the growing awareness of Greek tragedy. Memory of ancient drama was the only source of this art, and its unfolding was erratic because "it was as much a story of forgetfulness as a story of remembrance...
...minimized the contribution which the Italians of the Renaissance made to the rebirth of tragedy. While they rediscovered the important role of music in Greek drama, they retained a "demand for confining music within narrow banda." Their use of Greek ideas was almost entirely restricted to technical matters; they thus "suffered from an erroneous conception of the tragic...
...Oliver is destined for storybook transformation-the ill-born pauper turned well-born prince, the maltreated underling who bests his oppressors, the orphan boy who finds a father and a home. Every boy who ever had a nightmare or a dream, every adult who ever yearned for renewal or rebirth, feels the pull of Dickens' fable...
...seems a bit unreal, a bit irrelevant; and in a sense it is-in a sense Greek tragedy is dead and can never actually be brought to life. The tragic sense of life is much too primitive a philosophy for individuals who experience God as love and death as rebirth. On the other hand, it is altogether too advanced a concept for people who take man as the measure of all things...