An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera.
An opera composer shares his love for “this maddening, outlandish, impossible art form.”
Aucoin, a MacArthur fellow and the composer of operas about Walt Whitman and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, fell in love with the art form while growing up in suburban Boston during the 1990s and early 2000s. In this exceptional book, he describes what he calls opera’s impossibility, “the unattainability of its attempt to gather every artistic medium and every human sense into a single unified experience.” He offers “a practitioner’s view” of opera in essays that “draw extensively on my experience as composer, conductor, pianist, and vocal coach.” His passion is evident in every chapter, starting with an introduction on opera’s basic ingredients, including “the most primal human needs: song and narrative.” From there, he offers learned readings of earlier works about the Orpheus myth; Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; Verdi’s three Shakespeare operas; and two contemporary operas that give him hope for the genre’s future: Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angeland Chaya Czernowin’s Heart Chamber. Also included are chapters on the inspirations for his own operas, including Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries and the Eurydice play by Sarah Ruhl that “retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth through the eyes of its heroine.” Aucoin has a gift for accessible writing that mixes technical detail with descriptions that make the material unintimidating, as when he approvingly notes W.H. Auden’s “ready-for-RuPaul’s-Drag-Race affronts to good taste” in his libretto for The Rake’s Progressor when he writes that Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfershas harmonies that “might have struck a seventeenth-century audience as twangingly dissonant, but to modern ears the whole thing sounds positively groovy…the Beach Boys on the shores of Hell.” The author is often clever, as when he justifies barely mentioning Wagner in this book: “That guy gets enough airtime elsewhere.”
An inspirational trip through highlights of 400 years of opera.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-17538-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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