Word: straussed
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...Nothing doing," said NBC, and Menotti eventually came up with that bright and sturdy Christmas evergreen, Amahl and the Night Visitors. All told, Menotti has been cornered by circumstances enough times to produce a larger number of effective popular operas than any composer since Puccini and Strauss...
...principal theme in The Most Important Man is that whites, despite frequent good intentions, are unable to live up to their promises to blacks. "We have made the gesture, but we have not accepted blacks emotionally," Menotti explains. Musically, The Most Important Man is blatantly eclectic. Strains of Richard Strauss float from the pit during one interlude. By the final duet between Toime and his white girl friend Cora (Soprano Joanna Bruno), Menotti is unashamedly into the heart-throbbing lyricism of Puccini. Much less original than his 1950 Broadway success The Consul, or even his recent and endearing children...
...Tremor of Intent), the scatological novel (Enderby), the population-explosion novel (The Wanting Seed), the Third World satire (Devil of a State), the historical novel (Nothing Like the Sun), and the futuristic novel (A Clockwork Orange). Now comes MF, the biggest send-up of them all, on Claude Levi-Strauss's intellectually fashionable structural anthropology...
...Levi-Strauss's theory is that, appearances notwithstanding, the war-painted Indian and the nuclear physicist are as similar as fraternal twins: the human intellect has been operating in the same fundamental pattern since the dawn of society...
Such notions are the stuff that paradox is made of-true grist for the comic novelist. In MF, Burgess takes off from a Levi-Strauss contention that a universal connection exists between answering conundrums and committing incest. According to this view, it was not by chance that Oedipus' unwitting incest occurred after he solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Among the Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, there is a legend of brother-and-sister love in which riddles are posed by talking owls. In a 1967 essay, Burgess marvels at this transcultural yoking. In MF, the old Algonquin yarn...