Word: tasso
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...German barber-surgeon, Handel had left his home town of Halle at 18, had spent three years in Italy schooling himself in opera and oratorio. On his first visit to England, he patched Rinaldo together in a scant two weeks. Based on the poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), the opera was derided by Addison in The Spectator for its "Painted dragons spitting wildfire, and enchanted chariots drawn by Flanders mares." But its lush melodies were just what the public wanted: it became the first real operatic hit in English history. Its success won Handel a ?200 annual pension from...
Durable Conventions. Heliodorus fleshes out his narrative with excursions into Egyptian and Ethiopian culture, discourses on religion, military tactics, natural history, and love. His form and mode of thought had a great effect on men of the Renaissance: Tasso and Cervantes borrowed from him; many of the Elizabethans−particularly Sir Philip Sidney in The Arcadia−mined his work. The conventions he pioneered of a noble hero and heroine, accompanied by friends who are more comic and far more human, still survive in books, movies and TV serials...
Leopardi: A Study in Solitude is the foremost appreciation in English of the poet whom Italy ranks next to her greatest-Dante, Petrarch, Tasso. First printed in 1935 (but never before in the U.S.), it reappears now containing so much new matter that it is virtually a new book. Or, to put it another way, British-born Marchesa Iris Origo has dredged up so much new misery that Leopardi may now be seen to have been even unhappier than he was in the first edition...
Measured Gravity. One of the greats who got an unwelcome notice was Franz Liszt. After Liszt dropped his dazzling career as a pianist to compose his bombastic symphonic poems (Tasso, Les Preludes, Mazeppa), Hanslick wrote with measured gravity: "The musical world has suffered, in the virtuoso's abdication, a loss which the composer's succession can hardly compensate." Liszt stuck to his composing, but the verdict of time supports Critic Hanslick...
...shorter ballets are also in the program. "Le Combat" is based on a canto of Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered." In it Collette Marchand, who also stars in "L'Oeuf a la Coque," dances beautifully in a more traditional style. "Le Rendevous" is a somber and moody ballet of Paris which features Henry Danton. As good as they are, these suffer by comparison with such excitingly imaginative spectacles as "Carmen" and "L'Oeuf a la Coque...