Word: texts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Leading the local campaign to reform the Passion Play is Hans Schwaighofer, 57, who played Judas in 1960 and heads the local woodcarving school. He has long advocated an abridged version of an older text, first performed in 1750, by Father Ferdinand Rosner, a Benedictine poet. Archconservatives on the village council, which oversees the play, rejected that plan at the time of the 1970 pageant. To meet growing international protests, however, the council toned down some of the most offensive lines. No longer did the High Priest Caiaphas say of Jesus, "It would delight mine eyes to see/ his body...
Schwaighofer persevered, backed by liberal Catholics in the Bavarian culture ministry. Finally Bavaria's government and the village council voted $387,000 for trial performances of the Rosner text as modified by Schwaighofer and Munich Historian Alois Fink. That revised version was performed in a four-day tryout that ended last week...
...Lucifer. The Evil One mingles with the Jewish street crowds and accompanies Judas on his mission of betrayal. In one of the few lines with a parallel in both versions, Judas now says, "Oh what cursed gold I received, turning me into a traitor." The 19th century text goes, "Oh cursed money I received from you, the Jewish rot, the scum." Schwaighofer has also added other new elements: a loudspeaker system and stage lights for nighttime performances...
...eternal humbuggery of the English, used and overused by Shaw for comic relief and casual abuse. All of this might qualify him as a complete cynic or skeptic, except that he was a true child of the 19th century, with an ineradicable faith in the evolutionary process. Taking his text from Nietzsche - "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman" - Shaw found his equivalent for God in what he called the Life Force. He had a messianic faith that natural selection by the Life Force could enable man to produce an improved species of Homo sapiens, which...
...curator of entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, is currently writing a book on the evolution of ethics in relation to sociobiology. A specialist in the social insects, he wrote The Insect Societies (1971), then put in three years of 90-hour weeks working on his sociobiology text. Says he: "I wanted to synthesize and draw the boundaries to shape sociobiology into a discipline...