Word: wildernesses
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...Three. A sort of Mack Sennett investigation of the situation in Berlin, conducted with a wham-bam abandon by Director Billy Wilder...
According to Auden's Law, most of the plays of Thornton Wilder are a poor source for operatic material: deliberately unsensational, they often deal with lives that are determinedly sensible. But last week audiences in Mannheim, Germany, saw Wilder's one-act play, The Long Christmas Dinner, successfully transformed into opera by that master craftsman of contemporary music-Composer Paul Hindemith...
Composer and playwright met more than a decade ago when Hindemith was teaching at Yale. They discussed the possibility of setting one of Wilder's plays to music, but not until last year did Wilder finally get around to preparing the libretto of Christmas Dinner. He rewrote extensively, stripped some bits of characterization, but maintained the basic outline of his play, which recounts in one scene the 90-year chronicle of an American family...
Hindemith's greatest triumph was in making Wilder more believable: musically, the composer was often able to achieve rapid shifts in stage tempo and mood following a death or a birth with far more convincing effect than Wilder was able to achieve in plain prose. Critics hailed Christmas Dinner as first-rate opera, and the audience was clearly moved. "It certainly fits our family," muttered one damp-eyed woman as she left the hall...
...Three. A sort of Mack Sennett investigation of the situation in Berlin, conducted with a wham-bam abandon by Director Billy Wilder...