It's a long way from Canterbury to Rome, but an Italian composer has undertaken the cultural journey with fascinating results. Milan's La Scala last week staged a new opera by Ildebrando Pizzetti, based on T. S. Eliot's great verse play, Murder in the Cathedral. Italian title: Assassinio nella Cattedrale.
The perils of Pizzetti's journey were sizable. Eliot's spare verse and restrained, lugubrious lyricism simply could not be conveyed by the flowery, irrepressible Italian idiom. Thus "a sour spring, a parched summer, an empty harvest" sang out as "un'acre primavera, un'estate bruciata, ed un autunno sterile." The chilling wail of "Clear the...
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