Word: shylocks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Italian composer Giro Pinsuti experimented with the theme in his Mer-cante di Venezia in 1873. After that there was Deffès' Jessica (1898), Foerster's Jessika (1905), Alpaerts' Shylock (1913), and Hahn's Le Marchand de Venise (1935). The various operatic treatments of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice have one quality in common: they have all but disappeared from the stage. Last week yet another Merchant had arrived-with a good chance of beating the old jinx. The composer: Italy's Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco...
...Sonnet No. 109 ("O! Never say that I was false of heart") for his third-act finale. Under Castelnuovo-Tedesco's streamlining, the evils of intolerance become the play's main theme. But Castelnuovo-Tedesco changed the sense of Shakespeare in only one respect: he omitted Shylock's conversion to Christianity on the theory that no man of the Jew's temperament would abandon his faith...
Castelnuovo-Tedesco feels that in a way he is "contemporaneous" with Shylock, since "some of my ancestors were bankers in Florence when Shylock was a banker in Venice." A promising pianist, Castelnuovo-Tedesco studied composition under Ildebrando (Murder in the Cathedral) Pizzetti, built a successful prewar career, but in 1939 his music was banned by Mussolini. He fled with his family to California, where he composed movie scores, taught, and became a U.S. citizen. Although he still lives in Beverly Hills most of the time, he returns to Italy periodically, because "there is not much future in writing opera...
...final chapter, Rosenberg discusses some modern trends and the relationship of the Jewish myth to anti-semitism. "The myth of Shylock has, as it has once before, given rise to the countermyth: the myth of the Jew as artist, as aesthete, as hypersensitive and anxious man; and in this mask he has engaged the attention of the great novelists of our century. For the creators of Swann (but also Bloch), of Leopold Bloom, Joseph K, as well as the recreator of the Biblical Joseph, the Jew has come to reflect increasingly the problems and pressures of Western...
...From Shylock to Svengali is a complete, sensitive, well written and valuable work. The only question which Rosenberg does not take up is why the Shylock myth has managed to persist. What repressed fears is society acting out in its persistent creation of the knife bearing villain? Rosenberg says, "I am aware . . . that literary conventions can tell us only so much about a subject which is, as bottom, impenetrable...