Music
The "Frost Scene" in the third act has always attracted praise from critics. Edward J. Dent wrote that "The Frost Scene is one of Purcell's most famous achievements" with "its bold contrasts of style, and the masterly piling up of the music to a climax at the end of the chorus ''Tis love that has warmed us'." Thomas Gray, commenting on the 1736 production, described it as "excessive fine" and claimed that the Cold Genius' solo was "the finest song in the play." This aria ("What power art thou who from below") is accompanied by shivering strings, probably influenced by a scene from Act IV of Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera Isis (1677) but, as Peter Holman writes, Purcell's "daring chromatic harmonies transform the Cold Genius from the picturesque figure of Lully (or Dryden, for that matter) into a genuinely awe-inspiring character - the more so because Cupid's responses are set to such frothy and brilliant music." It has been suggested that the whole scene was inspired by the Frost fairs held on the Thames during the 1680s.
Venus' act V air "Fairest Isle" achieved wide fame, inspiring Charles Wesley's hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling to the same tune.
Read more about this topic: King Arthur (opera)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music.”
—William Shake{peare (1564–1616)
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)