Word: wharton
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...been captains of industry until recently (and there are precious few in that position now). But that should be no surprise to anyone. For the first 20 years of the century, women couldn't even vote. Every time I think of that, it startles me. Even as Edith Wharton wrote many of her novels, as Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe with honors, even as women--tens of thousands of them--typed the documents and ran the offices and manufactured the arms that led to victory in World War I, we still could not vote...
...Edith Wharton's well known novella, Ethan Frome--a tale of love, forbidden passion and its tragic consequences--lends itself particularly well to a genre whose main intention is to represent and express human feelings on a grander scale. And that genre is none other than opera. Opera vows to unite music and poetry so as to engage the audience in feeling as much empathy, compassion and even terror as possible...
...certainly cozy to be seated near the orchestra and to see all of the musicians, it eventually becomes distracting; the orchestra even drowns out the singing at some points. The stage itself is sparsely decorated: though not out of sync with the plain New England farmhouse of Wharton's novella, it still appears lacking. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the stage is so small that the actors often have nowhere...
...long-defunct love of Zeena causes his perpetual agony. Although the opera's most dramatic scenes--the breaking of Zeena's prize pickle plate and the infamous sledding scene in which Mattie and Ethan encounter their fateful punishment--are a little played down, this seems appropriate when viewed from Wharton's original perspective. In their boring, puritanical New England lives, even their dramas were still anguishingly slow and more silently painful than outwardly loud or angry...
...downplaying these small moments of mayhem,Ethan Frome pays homage to Wharton, making them all the more powerful. Ethan Frome is not sturm und drang, but rather a tale of mute desperation. Allanbrook Sr. and Hunt should be commended for keeping their opera true to a difficult, complex novella...