Word: schrade
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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...
...Middle Ages, he said, made drama "freakish polemic in the name of religion." Its only justification was the moral betterment of man, an aim he called "antagonistic to the tragedy." Schrade cast doubt on "what usefulness could ever lie in telling the stories" in which "nothing but horror remained...
...rather made it a human condition which the opera sought to communicate. The tragic element in his works was only "a momentary constellation and not of lasting significance, its roots are in human nature and the real and not in fate or the propitious shape of art." Schrade lays great emphasis on the role of fate in tragedy; he thus set Monteverdi's use of it apart from a truer form...
...Greeks, Schrade said, wisely bound together their ideas of tragedy and fate, for in the end "nothing short of sophistry will keep them apart as different entities." Tragedy needs "a superior, divine force, fate." The presence of this tragic greatness, he added, has been huffled today by "trifles". Modern music is "more deeply marked by the spirit of the tragic than we are willing to admit...