Word: styles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...finally got an offer he could not refuse. The remaining 6½ years of his ten-year contract were bought up by Paramount. Yablans rejected the idea that he had created a personality less lovable than Genghis Khan. "I am not a cocky bastard," he said. "I have my style, and in this business, you must do things bigger than life." As he prepared to leave Paramount, Yablans took his downfall philosophically. "I don't like being called a first-rate son of a bitch," he confided, "but at least I was called first-rate...
That his peasant drama succeeds so well lies in the music. Just as there are no heroes, there are no big arias or set-piece scenes. Not that the opera is merely a modified tone poem; it is compellingly dramatic. In style, there may be a bit of Mascagni pageantry here, an arioso there that could have flown right out of Butterfly. But the sound is distinct and modern, punctuated by post-romantic dissonances. Then there are charming interludes peculiar to Janáček. He loved duplicating spoken inflections and rhythms in sung speech. He doted on mini three...
That this opera could have been neglected for so many years testifies to the cruel, often mindless vagaries of musical fashion in the U.S. throughout the past generation or two. Legend is not a great work. It does not introduce any innovations in musical or dramatic style. It could in fact as easily have been written in 1910 as 1941. It has the directness (though not the genius) of Verdi, the misty orchestral hues of Delius and a soulful melodic style that both Puccini and Sigmund Romberg might have liked. Given the longstanding American addiction to the new and different...
...going on 40 years now, Dwight Macdonald has written to-or at-his fellow Americans rather in the style of an indignant letter to the Times. The things Your Correspondent has to put up with! From native gaucheries ("Our manners are either bad or nonexistent") to Hollywood movies ("Palm trees don't make Los Angeles an exotic city and options on Ulysses don't make Hollywood a sophisticated one"). Then there's Webster's New International Dictionary (third edition), the "One Hundred Great Books," and all translations of the Bible except the King James Version. Will...
What do Macdonald's windmills have in common as the tiller sees them? Humbug. Cant. The special form of dishonesty that betrays itself as lack of style. Irving Howe once complained that if Jesus were to deliver the Sermon on the Mount tomorrow, "Dwight Macdonald would write that while 'Mr. Christ makes some telling points' they suffer from syntactical confusion and 'a woolly, pretentious style.' " Macdonald's answer: "Were the Sermon woolly," that would be "my reaction, and I should be right, since in that case the Sermon would not be the great moral...