Style
The music of the opera combines influences ranging from Alban Berg, Igor Stravinsky, and Benjamin Britten to Kurt Weill and the tangos of Ástor Piazzolla in a witty, camp, and highly individual manner.
Describing the overall impact of the libretto and the theatricality of the entire production, Alex Ross notes:
- "Hensher seized the opportunity to create the first onstage blow job in opera history, but he also twisted the story into something more generalised and expressionistic: Margaret becomes a half-comic, half-tragic figure, a nitwit outlaw. There were clear parallels with Alban Berg’s epic of degradation, Lulu The libretto reads like a nasty farce, but it takes on emotional breadth when the music is added. With a few incredibly seductive stretches of thirties-era popular melody, Adès shows the giddy world that the Duchess lost, and when her bright harmony lurches down to a terrifying B-flat minor he exposes the male cruelty that quickened her fall. Adès's harmonic tricks have a powerful theatrical impact: there’s a repeated sense of a beautiful mirage shattering into cold, alienated fragments".
Read more about this topic: Powder Her Face
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The old saying of Buffon’s that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can get—but then most men mistake grammar for style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)