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Jack Beeson
Jack Hamilton Beeson (July 15, 1921 – June 6, 2010) was an American composer. He was known particularly for his operas, the best known of which are ''Lizzie Borden'', ''Hello Out There!'', and ''The Sweet Bye and Bye''. Early life Born in Muncie, Indiana, Beeson began with music when he started piano lessons with Luella Weimer in 1928, but it was not until 1933 that he began to compose. He decided to become an "opera-composer" after being influenced by Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. From 1936 until 1939, he switched piano teachers and was with Percival Owen during this period of time. In 1938 he received certificates with first class honors in piano and theory from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Toronto, a very well earned accomplishment at the age of 21. From 1944 to 1945 he had private studies with Béla Bartók in New York City. At this time he was also associating with the Columbia University Opera Workshop and the opera productions of Columbia Theatre As ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lizzie Borden (opera)
''Lizzie Borden'' is the sixth and best known opera by American composer Jack Beeson, commissioned by the Ford Foundation. The libretto by Kenward Elmslie after a scenario by Richard Plant is based on the real-life case of Lizzie Borden. It was premiered on March 25, 1965, by the New York City Opera conducted by Anton Coppola Antonio Francesco Coppola (March 21, 1917 – March 9, 2020) was an American opera conductor and composer. He was the uncle of film director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, as well as the great-uncle of Nicolas Cage, Christopher ... and subsequently released on record. The roughly two-hour opera is in three acts and an epilogue and is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Roles Synopsis The plot is a dramatic retelling of the famed double axe murders of the stepmother and the father of the title character in Fall River, Massachusetts. However a great number of dramatic changes are made for effectiveness on the stage. References External ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the List of United States cities by population density, most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York (state), New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area, urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous Megacity, megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global city, global Culture of New ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom (April 30, 1888 – July 3, 1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded ''Kenyon Review''. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist. Background John Crowe Ransom was born on April 30, 1888, in Pulaski, Tennessee. His father, John James Ransom (1853–1934) was a Methodist minister. His mother was Sara Ella (Crowe) Ransom (1859–1947). He had two sisters, Annie Phillips and Ella Irene, and one brother, Richard. He grew up in Spring Hill, Franklin, Springfield, and Nashville, Tennessee. He was home schooled until age ten. From 1899 to 1903, he attended the Bowen School, a public school whose headmaster was Vanderbilt alumnus Angus Gordon Bowen. He entered Vander ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Educational Television
National Educational Television (NET) was an American non-commercial educational, educational terrestrial television, broadcast television network owned by the Ford Foundation and later co-owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It operated from May 16, 1954 to October 4, 1970, and was succeeded by the PBS, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which has network affiliate#Member stations, memberships with many television stations that were formerly part of NET. The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) provided funds for cataloging the NET collection, and as part of an on-going preservation effort with the Library of Congress, over 10,000 digitized television programs from the non-commercial TV stations and producers spanning 1952 to 1972 have been contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. History The network was founded as the Educational Television and Radio Center (ETRC) in November 1952 by a grant from the Ford Foundation's Fund for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
My Heart's In The Highlands (play)
''My Heart's in the Highlands'' is a one act play by Armenian-American dramatist and author William Saroyan, adapted from his short story, "The Man with the Heart in the Highlands". Saroyan's first play, it is a comedy about a young boy and his Armenian family. It was produced on Broadway at the Guild Theatre. Adaptations Chamber opera The play was adapted into a chamber opera by U.S. composer Jack Beeson in 1969 and had its world debut on U.S. network National Educational Television, the predecessor of the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service, March 17, 1970. The 90-minute broadcast, directed by pioneering operatic TV director Kirk Browning Kirk Browning (March 28, 1921 – February 10, 2008) was an American television director and producer who had hundreds of productions to his credit, including 185 broadcasts of ''Live from Lincoln Center''. Born in New York City, Browning dropp ..., was part of the NET Opera Theater series, which aired on NET and then on PBS. The TV broadca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Plant (writer)
Richard Plant (July 22, 1910 – March 10, 1998) was a gay Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany, first to Switzerland and then to the U.S., who became a professor at the City University of New York, where he taught German language and literature from 1947 to 1973. He authored an opera scenario as well a number of fictional and non-fictional works, notably ''The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals'' (1986). The early years in Frankfurt (1910–1933) Richard Plant was born Richard Plaut in Frankfurt am Main to Meta and Theodor Plaut, a practicing physician who served for many years as a Social Democratic city council alderman. While his parents were religiously non-observant and largely assimilated, his paternal grandfather, Dr. Rudolf Plaut, was a Reform rabbi.Of Sephardic heritage, the Plaut family lived in Hesse for centuries. Plant's paternal grandfatheRuben Plaut(1843–1914), who Germanized his first name to Rudolf, was born in the village of Mackenzell (inc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenward Elmslie
Kenward Gray Elmslie (April 27, 1929 – June 29, 2022) was an American author, performer, editor and publisher associated with the New York School of poetry. Life and career Kenward Gray Elmslie was born to William and Constance Pulitzer in Manhattan on April 27, 1929. His father was a tutor who met his mother, the youngest child of Joseph Pulitzer while working as a tutor for her siblings. He spent his childhood in Colorado Springs, Colorado and Washington, D.C. He attended St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a B.A. in literature. He relocated to Cleveland to work as an intern at Karamu House, where there was an interracial theatre group. There he met lyricist John Latouche (1914-1956). At Latouche's invitation, Elmslie relocated back to New York in 1952 to live with him. In 1953 the couple bought a farmhouse in Calais, Vermont. Elmslie collaborated with Latouche on some of his lyrics, including (uncredited) the lyric of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature. Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and Worl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Saroyan
William Saroyan (; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film ''The Human Comedy''. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, '' The Human Comedy.'' Saroyan is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California. Many of his stories and plays are set in his native Fresno. Some of his best-known works are ''The Time of Your Life'', ''My Name Is Aram'' and '' My Heart's in the Highlands''. His two collections of short stories from the 1930s, ''Inhale Exhale'' (1936) and ''The Daring Young Man On the Flying Trapeze'' (1941) are regarded as among his major achievements and essential documents of the cultural history of the period on the American West Coast. He has been described in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clyde Fitch
Clyde Fitch (May 2, 1865 – September 4, 1909) was an American dramatist, the most popular writer for the Broadway stage of his time (c. 1890–1909). Biography Born in Elmira, New York, and educated at Holderness School and Amherst College (class of 1886), William Clyde Fitch wrote over 60 plays, 36 of them original, ranging from social comedies and farces to melodrama and historical dramas. His father, Captain William G. Fitch, a graduate of West Point and Union officer in the Civil War, encouraged his son to become an architect or to engage in a career of business; but his mother, Alice Clark, in whose eyes he could do no wrong, always believed in his artistic talent. (For her son's final resting place, she hired the architectural firm of Hunt & Hunt to design the sarcophagus set inside an open Tuscan temple at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.) Fitch graduated from Amherst in 1886, where he was a member of Chi Psi fraternity. As an undergraduate, "he dazzled his fellow studen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sheldon Harnick
Sheldon Mayer Harnick (born April 30, 1924) is an American lyricist and songwriter best known for his collaborations with composer Jerry Bock on musicals such as ''Fiorello!'' and ''Fiddler on the Roof''. Early life Sheldon Mayer Harnick was born to American Jewish parents and grew up in the Chicago neighborhood of Portage Park. Musical career Harnick began writing music while still in Carl Schurz High School in Chicago. After his Army service, he graduated from the Northwestern University School of Music (1946–1949) with a Bachelor of Music degree, and worked with various orchestras in the Chicago area. He then moved to New York City and wrote for many musicals and revues. He was friends with Charlotte Rae from college, and he went to see her one night at the Village Vanguard where she was singing a revue. Yip Harburg, who was one of Harnick's idols, heard she was singing a song of his and decided to come. He told Harnick that he enjoyed his writing, and urged him to continu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Captain Jinks Of The Horse Marines
''Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines'' is an opera in three acts by Jack Beeson written in 1975 to a libretto by Sheldon Harnick after the 1901 play of the same name by Clyde Fitch. The play had previously been adapted for a 1916 silent film. The world premiere was September 20, 1975 at the Lyric Theater, Kansas City, Missouri directed and choreographed by Jack Eddleman and conducted by Russell Patterson. It was produced by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. A recording of the original cast was published in 2010 by Albany Records.CD Liner Notes, ''Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines: A Romantic Comedy in Music, Music by Jack Beeson, Libretto by Sheldon Harnick, Based on the Play by Clyde Fitch,'' (p) 1976 Sony Music Entertainment, Under license from The Sony Music Custom Marketing Group, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, (c) 201Albany Records Catalog no.: TROY1149-50. Synopsis Jonathan Jinks and his friends Salty Sam and Charlie go to welcome opera star Aurelia Trentoni. Cha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
