Word: text
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...standard harmonic progressions or even the modern "tone row." Instead, it sustained for page after page a single chordal theme, varied only with starkly primitive rhythm in the orchestra and percussion-punctuated declamation by the singers. The work was typical, too, in its close welding of music to text (by 18th century German Poet Friedrich Hölderlin). The oddly assorted orchestra-which included four pianos for eight players, four harps, a glass harmonica, marimbaphone, xylophones, bongos, congas, gongs and no strings except for nine double basses-served less to score Sophocles' tragedy than to underscore it. Every word...
...culture) and raising his sightless eyes with a beatific smile. Soprano Varnay refused to watch from the wings because "I dream about such things." Reported TIME Correspondent Paul Moor: "For a non-German-speaking audience, this opera has long, boring stretches because the music is so subservient to the text. Nevertheless, Orff has created a theater work of gripping power...
...LIFE AND TIMES OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, by Stefan Lorant (640 pp.; Doubleday; $15), will seem as essential to admirers of Teddy Roosevelt as Lorant's Lincoln is to worshipers of Honest Abe. The text is painstaking rather than incisive, but the 750 pictures have the cumulative effect of a cradle-to-grave biography that hardly requires words to give it significance...
MARCEL DUCHAMP, by Robert Lebel (191 pp.; Grove; $15), is billed as the "first full-scale study" of the Daddy of Dadaists. The scrappy text suggests that the author followed a method once used by Duchamp for writing music-he drew notes and musical markings out of a bag at random. But the volume makes up for the grab-bag text by reproducing almost every known work of Expressionist Cubist-Surrealist Duchamp, from his mustachioed Mona Lisa and famed Nude Descending a Staircase to the catalogue cover he decorated with a foam-rubber breast and the caption: "Please touch...
...little lonely, a little too distant from its materials, a little too given to mood. Music does service for speech; the Inge touches, the Inge faces, even where effective, seem overfamiliar. Perhaps the play's too plangent and elegiac title helps express what is unsatisfying about its text...