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:
“Let us describe the education of our men.... What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.”
—Plato (c. 427347 B.C.)
“Sound all the lofty instruments of war,
And by that music let us all embrace,
For, heaven to earth, some of us never shall
A second time do such a courtesy.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)
“The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (17491832)