Word: symbolist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Feltsman falls between extremes. An angular, bearded man with the suffering face of a symbolist poet, he communes with the keyboard, not with the audience. His technique is solid but not especially flashy, his tone rich but not warm. Like many Soviets, Feltsman has some residual romantic mannerisms, such as a rhythmic stutter step in phrasing that in the early 19th century would have been viewed as a genuine rubato (literally, robbing the time value of one note and adding it to another) but is today decried as distortion...
...sense, then, our monarchs are in fact our subjects, hostage to the dreams we wish them to enact. Axel, the wan hero dreamed up by the French symbolist Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, famously suggested that he and his fellow aristocrats leave the messy business of living to their servants; these days, we would just as soon leave it to our monarchs. We demand of them, moreover, a double role: they must be godlike mortals, fallible gods. Upon peering into their closets, we wish not only to marvel at the gowns but also to revel in the skeletons that hang...
...account that emerges from that brief visit is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist's eye. Rushdie the symbolist notes that the wife of the deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was named Hope and that the Ministry of Culture goes by the acronym MINICULT. Rushdie the ironist observes that the campesinos battling "U.S. imperialism" dine to the radio accompaniment of Born in the U.S.A...
...existent. History, fickle jade, balked at this fence and took a turn. One cannot imagine future painters mining Louis' work for motifs and ideas, the way Jackson Pollock's was mined by Louis and other artists of his generation. Here is the beautiful impasse, the last exhalation of symbolist nuance in America, soon to be a period style...
...brooding music is spheres apart from the pastoral beauties of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun or the nautical tone painting of La Mer. Indeed, in its consummate wedding of text to music, the work Usher most closely resembles is Debussy's only completed opera, the shadowy symbolist drama Pelleas et Melisande. The tormented Roderick Usher, Poe's unhappy protagonist, is depicted in agonized music that is drenched by the misery in the man's soul. Debussy intended Usher to last about an hour; Allende-Blin's realization runs a little more than 22 tantalizing minutes. What a pity...