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What Where
''What Where'' is Samuel Beckett's last play produced following a request for a new work for the 1983 Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. It was written between February and March 1983 initially in French as ''Quoi où'' and translated by Beckett himself. Synopsis The play begins with a voice issuing forth from a dimly lit megaphone: "We are the last five."Beckett, S., ''Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett'' (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 310 Only four characters appear throughout the performance however, ''Bam'', ''Bom'', ''Bim'', and ''Bem'' (an echo of Rimbaud's sonnet, "Voyelles") but the voice does not belong to a putative ''Bum'', rather it is the "Voice of Bam".Beckett, S., ''Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett'' (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 309 The men are all dressed in identical grey gowns with the same long grey hair. Before the drama proper commences there is a quick run through of the action without words. The four characters enter and exit, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. It became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plural
The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one (a form that represents this default quantity of one is said to be of ''singular'' number). Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word ''cats'', which corresponds to the singular ''cat''. Words of other types, such as verbs, adjectives and pronouns, also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement with the number of their associated nouns. Some languages also have a dual (denoting exactly two of something) or other systems of number categories. However, in English and many other languages, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers, exce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (28 May 1925 – 18 May 2012) was a German lyric baritone and conductor of classical music, one of the most famous Lieder (art song) performers of the post-war period, best known as a singer of Franz Schubert's Lieder, particularly ''"Winterreise"'' of which his recordings with accompanists Gerald Moore and Jörg Demus are still critically acclaimed half a century after their release. Recording an array of repertoire (spanning centuries) as musicologist Alan Blyth asserted, "No singer in our time, or probably any other has managed the range and versatility of repertory achieved by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Opera, Lieder and oratorio in German, Italian or English came alike to him, yet he brought to each a precision and individuality that bespoke his perceptive insights into the idiom at hand." In addition, he recorded in French, Russian, Hebrew, Latin and Hungarian. He was described as "one of the supreme vocal artists of the 20th century" and "the most ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Winterreise
''Winterreise'' (, ''Winter Journey'') is a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert ( D. 911, published as Op. 89 in 1828), a setting of 24 poems by German poet Wilhelm Müller. It is the second of Schubert's two song cycles on Müller's poems, the earlier being ''Die schöne Müllerin'' (D. 795, Op. 25, 1823). Both were originally written for tenor voice but are frequently transposed to other vocal ranges, a precedent set by Schubert himself. The two works pose interpretative demands on listeners and performers due to their scale and structural coherence. Although Ludwig van Beethoven's cycle ''An die ferne Geliebte'' (''To the Distant Beloved'') was published earlier, in 1816, Schubert's cycles hold the foremost place in the genre's history. Authorship and composition ''Winterreise'' was composed in two parts, each with twelve songs, the first part in February 1827 and the second in October 1827. The two parts were also published separately by Tobias Haslinger, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Song Cycle
A song cycle (german: Liederkreis or Liederzyklus) is a group, or cycle (music), cycle, of individually complete Art song, songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a unit.Susan Youens, ''Grove online'' The songs are either for solo voice or an ensemble, or rarely a combination of solo songs mingled with choral pieces. The number of songs in a song cycle may be as brief as two songs or as long as 30 or more songs. The term "song cycle" did not enter lexicography until 1865, in Arrey von Dommer's edition of ''Koch’s Musikalisches Lexikon'', but works definable in retrospect as song cycles existed long before then. One of the earliest examples may be the set of seven Cantiga de amigo, Cantigas de amigo by the 13th-century Galicians, Galician jongleur Martin Codax. Jeffrey Mark identified the group of dialect songs 'Hodge und Malkyn' from Thomas Ravenscroft's ''The Briefe Discourse'' (1614) as the first of a number of early 17th Century examples in England. A song cycle is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert (; 31 January 179719 November 1828) was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast ''oeuvre'', including more than 600 secular vocal works (mainly lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libr ...s, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include "Erlkönig (Schubert), Erlkönig" (D. 328), the Trout Quintet, Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 (''Trout Quintet''), the Symphony No. 8 (Schubert), Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 (''Unfinished Symphony''), the Symphony No. 9 (Schubert), "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944, the String Quintet (Schubert), String Quintet (D. 956), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
How It Is
''How It Is'' is a novel by Samuel Beckett first published in French as ''Comment c'est'' by Les Editions de Minuit in 1961. The Grove Press (New York) published Beckett's English translation in 1964. An advance text of his English translation of the third part appeared in the 1962 issue of the Australian literary journal, '' Arna''. ''L'Image'', an early variant version of ''Comment c'est'', was published in the British arts review, ''X: A Quarterly Review'' (1959), and is the first appearance of the novel in any form. The novel is a monologue by the narrator as he crawls through endless mud, recalling his life separated into three distinct periods. Synopsis The title is Beckett's literal translation of the French phrase, ''comment c'est'' (how it is), a pun on the French verb ''commencer'' or 'to begin'. The text is divided into three parts: "before Pim" - the solitary narrator journeys in the mud-dark until he encounters another creature like himself thereby forming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endgame (play)
''Endgame'', by Samuel Beckett, is an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play about a blind, paralyzed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents and his doddering, dithering, harried, servile companion in an abandoned shack in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who mention their awaiting some unspecified “end” which seems to be the end of their relationship, death, and the end of the actual play itself. Much of the play’s content consists of terse, back and forth dialogue between the characters reminiscent of bantering, along with trivial stage actions; the plot is held together by the development of a grotesque story-within-a-story the character Hamm is writing. An aesthetically profound part of the play is the way the story-within-story and the actual play come to an end at roughly the same time. The play’s title refers to chess and frames the characters as acting out a losing battle with each other or their fate. It was originally written in French (entitled ''Fin de partie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Murphy (novel)
''Murphy'', first published in 1938, is an avant-garde novel as well as the third work of prose fiction by the Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett. The book was Beckett's second published prose work after the short-story collection ''More Pricks than Kicks'' (published in 1934) and his unpublished first novel ''Dream of Fair to Middling Women'' (published posthumously in 1992). It was written in English, rather than the French of much of Beckett's later writing. After many rejections, it was published by Routledge on the recommendation of Beckett's painter friend Jack Butler Yeats. The University of Reading bought the six notebooks which made up the manuscript for ''Murphy'' in July 2013. Plot summary The plot of ''Murphy'' follows an eponymous "seedy solipsist" who lives in a soon-to-be-condemned apartment in West Brompton. The novel opens with the protagonist having tied himself naked to a rocking chair in his apartment, rocking back and forth in the dark. This seems to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emblem
An emblem is an abstract or representational pictorial image that represents a concept, like a moral truth, or an allegory, or a person, like a king or saint. Emblems vs. symbols Although the words ''emblem'' and '' symbol'' are often used interchangeably, an emblem is a pattern that is used to represent an idea or an individual. An emblem develops in concrete, visual terms some abstraction: a deity, a tribe or nation, or a virtue or vice. An emblem may be worn or otherwise used as an identifying badge or patch. For example, in America, police officers' badges refer to their personal metal emblem whereas their woven emblems on uniforms identify members of a particular unit. A real or metal cockle shell, the emblem of St. James the Apostle, sewn onto the hat or clothes, identified a medieval pilgrim to his shrine at Santiago de Compostela. In the Middle Ages, many saints were given emblems, which served to identify them in paintings and other images: St. Catheri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Society
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent of members. In the social sciences, a larger society often exhibits stratification or dominance patterns in subgroups. Societies construct patterns of behavior by deeming certain actions or concepts as acceptable or unacceptable. These patterns of behavior within a given society are known as societal norms. Societies, and their norms, undergo gradual and perpetual changes. Insofar as it is collaborative, a society can enable its members to benefit in ways that would otherwise be difficult on an individua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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