Word: wertherism
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Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther told the story of a preternaturally sensitive poet whose impossible love eventually leads to suicide. After it appeared in print young people throughout Europe began imitating Werther's style of dress, talking like him and contemplating Romantic suicide. Many opted to share the fictional character's fate, to embrace his vast yearnings and finally to become tragic heroes in their own eyes. The thought of them always fills me with an immense sadness...
...weakest of the leads was tenor Rojas in the role of Alfredo, his sophomore performance with the BLO (after debuting triumphantly last year in Werther). Alfredo goes from one emotional extreme to another in the course of the opera--love, ecstasy, awe, anger, revenge and loss is a lot for three short acts--and the role consequently requires an actor who is able to convey this both dramatically and musically...
Although Occasional Prose ranges back to 1968, none of it is dated, and little seems forced by headlines. McCarthy writes, therefore she is, and she is everywhere. In the course of a dissertation on cooking, she quotes a parody of Goethe's Werther: "Charlotte, having seen his body/ Borne before her on a shutter,/ Like a well-conducted person,/ Went on cutting bread and butter." Charlotte was a lady after the author's art. Let violence and fatuities pass in review; the well-conducted Mary McCarthy will watch and then slice them into appropriate pieces. Books and events have always...
There were academic fads in 1858 and 1958 alike. In Adams's day it was "German scholarship," and Goethe. 100 years later, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" were required reading but they had become incomprehensible, indeed ridiculous. But we had Freud--in Shakespeare, in history, in the family, everywhere but in bad, (particle hours is a phrase contemporary students may never have heard: it means "never...
There were academic fads in 1858 and 1958 alike. In Adams's day it was "German scholarship," and Goethe. 100 years later, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" were required reading but they had become incomprehensible, indeed ridiculous. But we had Freud--in Shakespeare, in history, in the family, everywhere but in bad, (particle hours is a phrase contemporary students may never have heard: it means "never...