Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

~Rabrindranath Tagore ~

Maria Callas:La divina

Born in New York City in 1923 to Greek immigrants, Callas demonstrated her talent for singing at an early age. When she was 13, she went to Athens to study under the noted soprano Elvira de Hidalgo. Her first major operatic role came in 1947, when she appeared in La Gioconda in Verona. Acclaimed for a powerful soprano voice that lent itself to the difficult coloratura roles, she was soon appearing in opera houses around the world. Her talents made possible the revival of 19th-century bel canto works by Bellini and others that had not been performed for decades.

“An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.    
                                                                                       ”

1957 ~Norma~

  “ On stage, I am in the dark. ”   


Rodolfo Celleti
 “    Her voice was penetrating. The volume as such was average: neither small nor powerful. But the penetration, allied to this incisive quality (which bordered on the ugly because it frequently contained an element of harshness) ensured that her voice could be clearly heard anywhere in the auditorium. 
                                                                                                                           ”
Maestro Carlo Maria Giulini
  
    “  It is very difficult to speak of the voice of Callas. Her voice was a very special instrument. Something happens sometimes with string instruments—violin, viola, cello—where the first moment you listen to the sound of this instrument, the first feeling is a bit strange sometimes. But after just a few minutes, when you get used to, when you become friends with this kind of sound, then the sound becomes a magical quality. This was Callas.
                                                                                        ” 
           Walter Legge
  “ Most admirable of all her qualities, however, were her taste, elegance and deeply musical use of ornamentation in all its forms and complications, the weighting and length of every appoggiatura, the smooth incorporation of the turn in melodic lines, the accuracy and pacing of her trills, the seemingly inevitable timing of her portamentos, varying their curve with enchanting grace and meaning. There were innumerable exquisite felicities—minuscule portamentos from one note to its nearest neighbor, or over widespread intervals—and changes of color that were pure magic. In these aspects of bel canto she was supreme mistress of that art. 
            ”


          Mathew Gurewitsch                                                                                                         
“ In fact the essence of her art was refinement. The term seems odd for a performer whose imagination and means of expression were so prodigious. She was eminently capable of the grand gesture; still, judging strictly from the evidence of her recordings, we know (and her few existing film clips confirm) that her power flowed not from excess but from unbroken concentration, unfaltering truth in the moment. It flowed also from irreproachable musicianship. People say that Callas would not hesitate to distort a vocal line for dramatic effect. In the throes of operatic passion plenty of singers snarl, growl, whine, and shriek. Callas was not one of them. She found all she needed in the notes  
                                                                                                                                         ”


    Eugenio Gara
“  Her secret is in her ability to transfer to the musical plane the suffering of the character she plays, the nostalgic longing for lost happiness, the anxious fluctuation between hope and despair, between pride and supplication, between irony and generosity, which in the end dissolve into a superhuman inner pain. The most diverse and opposite of sentiments, cruel deceptions, ambitious desires, burning tenderness, grievous sacrifices, all the torments of the heart, acquire in her singing that mysterious truth, I would like to say, that psychological sonority, which is the primary attraction of opera.
                                                                                                               ”

Callas & Onassis

    
     

     Callas & Marilyn

Callas& Grace Kelly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QobNvudIGGY

             Daria 

              ..a smart and acerbic teenage girl.

''a satire of highschool life popular culture and social classes.''

      Helmut Newton ; an outstanding photographer.

 He was a fashion photograher and his provocative black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue. He established a particular style marked by erotic scenes ,often with sado-masochistic and fetishistic subtexts. It is said that he loved his wife and he used to demote other beautiful women. His work is priceless and controversial as you can see..

 

Romantic period - 'Drama'

Although we know the Romantic Period as an age of poetry, nonfiction prose forms flourished during the epoch. England throughout this period had a vibrant theatrical culture. Theater criticism ,practiced with flair by Hazlitt and Lamb , emerged as a new prose genre. But there were many restrictions limiting what could be staged and many calls for reform. Dramas had to meet the approval of a censor before they could be performed, a rule in place since 1737. Another restriction was that only the theaters royal( in London Drury Lane and Covent Garden) had the legal right to produce 'legitimate'-spoken word-drama, leaving the other stages limited to entertainments -pantomimes and melodramas mainly -in which dialogue was by regulation always ccombined with music. The theatrical culture's demotion of words might explain why the poets of the era, however stagestruck, found drama uncongenial. Nonetheless, almost all tried their hands at the form , tempted by the knowledge that the plays of certain of their contemporaries- Hannah Cowley and Charles Maturin -had met with immense acclaim. Some of the poet's plays were composed to be read rather than performed (closet dramas), such as Byron's Manfred, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and most of Baillie's Plays on the Passions,permitted experimentation with topic and form. 

Others were written expressly for the stage ,but their authors were hampered by their inexperience and tendency, exacerbated by the cencorship that encouraged them to seek safe subject matter in the past, to imitate the style of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

There were exceptions to this discouraging record. Colerigde's tragedy "Remorse", for instance, was a minor hit and ran for twenty nights in 1813.

The most capable dramatist among the poets was ,surprisingly, Percy Shelley. His powerful tragedy "The Cenci" (1820) , the story of a monstrous father who rapes his own daughter and is murdered by her in turn , was deemed unstageable on political rather than artistic or technical grounds. It had no chance of getting by the Examiner of Plays; indeed, by thematizing the unspeakable topic of incest , Shelley predicted his own censoring.

(The Norton Anthology of English Literature)