Style
The opera is written in a free tonal style, with clear influences from the operas of Alban Berg and from minimalism. The musical style is narrative rather than lyric, with nothing that could reasonably be described as an aria and only a few trios and quartets. There is however a beautiful and moving duet for the heroine and her double.
Much of the rather haunting atmosphere is built from the repetitive, chanting, choruses of the handmaids.
Read more about this topic: The Handmaid's Tale (opera)
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)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)