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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 15, 2010

TT: Gentlemen, start your engines

June 15, 2010 by Terry Teachout

DANSE%20RUSSE%20PHOTO.jpgPaul Moravec and I are now at work on our second opera–but don’t call it that!
The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, which gets underway on April 1, 2011, is a citywide venture that will encompass the premieres of thirty-one works intended to capture “the inventive, no-holds-barred spirit of Paris: 1910-1920, the inspiration and theme of the 25-day festival.” Center City Opera Theater is contributing to the festivities with a program that will pair Renard, a rarely produced one-act chamber opera composed in 1916 by Igor Stravinsky, with a new work written for the same performing forces as Renard, four male singers (two tenors, a baritone, and a bass-baritone) and a small instrumental ensemble.
lesac_2.jpgAndrew Kurtz, who runs Center City Opera, invited Paul and me to write a companion piece to Renard. I came up with the idea of a backstage farce about the creation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The title is Danse Russe. The four characters, whose real-life models are pictured above, are:
• Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, who commissioned The Rite of Spring
• Vaslav Nijinsky, Diaghilev’s lover and star dancer, who choreographed the ballet
• Pierre Monteux, who conducted the first performance
• Stravinsky himself
Unlike The Letter, our previous collaboration, Danse Russe is a knockabout comedy with spoken dialogue. We’re calling it a “vaudeville,” and we expect it to play more like a musical than an opera. I finished the first draft of the libretto three weeks ago, and Paul started writing the music last week.
We open in Philadelphia on April 15–and yes, I’ll be blogging with steadily increasing frequency about the making of Danse Russe between now and then.
More as it happens.

CAAF: Your ex-girlfriend gives it one year, tops

June 15, 2010 by ldemanski

thebyrons.jpg
I’m amused by this pen and ink sketch of Lord and Lady Byron shortly after their marriage. It was drawn by Lady Caroline Lamb, who had carried on an affair with the poet before being thrown over a few years before (it was Lamb who called Bryon “mad, bad and dangerous to know”). As with the couple’s correspondence about religion, it’s an early signal that the marriage was headed for a spectacular flame-out. Lamb was hardly objective of course, but look at that body language!
The sketches Lamb kept in her journals have real wit and charm. But the novel she later wrote about Byron, Glenarvon, is wonderfully terrible. I’m reading it right now and it’s like slogging through a juvenile Bronte effort with all the trotting around moonlit ruins and character names like Calantha, the Duchess of Altamonte and Sir Everard St. Clare. Sample:

At this very period of time, in the prosecution of her sudden and accursed designs, having bade adieu to brighter climes and more polished manners, with all the gaiety of apparent innocence, and all the brilliancy of wit which belongs to spirits light as air and a refined and highly cultivated genius, she was sailing, accompanied by a train of admirers, selected from the flower of Italy, once again to visit her native country.

That does sound fancy, doesn’t it? And evil. I wish Lamb had done the book as a graphic novel instead.
(Sketch scanned from Fiona MacCarthy’s very good Bryon: Life and Legend.)

TT: Almanac

June 15, 2010 by Terry Teachout

“A man’s hope measures his civilization.”
Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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