Music
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I This writer has long been an admirer of Schreker. Reading about this composer, Macdara came across the following extraordinary sentence: It has taken quite some time for Schreker’s star to rise above the horizon below which it set on his death in 1934 (a fateful year which also saw the death of Holst, Elgar…
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Macdara has long had the desire to write about the nocturnal tragedy that is Il Trovatore, if only to note two things. Firstly, he wishes to revisit the accepted notion that this opera represents the epitome of silly or confusing operatic Plots. In fact, once one can accept that Azucena threw the wrong baby on…
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There being too much Politics at present for exhausted Macdara to tackle, let us turn again to Music for relief. Your correspondent is known for three slogans: one, there is no such thing as a bad margarita; two, bad camp is unforgivable; three, beauty is not reactionary. If he had to expand upon these wise…
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It is not a necessary condition of writing about opera that it attempt to match the melodramatic heights of the operatic experience in its language. But tacky and stupid people would disagree, and unfortunately many of them have jobs that not only involve writing about opera, but in fact involve writing about opera on behalf…