Happy Alchemy: On the Pleasures of Music and the Theatre

by Robertson Davies

Overview

The acclaimed playwright, novelist, and author of Fifth Business explores the performing arts in this witty and insightful essay collection.

Though best known for his award-winning fiction, Robertson Davies enjoyed a long and varied career as an actor, playwright, journalist and critic. Happy Alchemy collects an equally diverse range of Davies’ writings—including speeches, articles, prologues to plays, a ghost story set to music, and even a scenario for a film. In this eclectic volume, Davies shares his many musings on music, theatre, opera, and more. These pieces, many of them published here for the first time, touch on topics from Greek tragedy to Scottish Folklore and from Lewis Carroll to Carl Jung.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780795352492
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Publication date:	04/22/2019
Pages:	385
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.24(d)

About the Author

CA

Editorial Reviews

...even the slightest of these highly diverse essays, speeches, parodies and playlets display such wit, charm and insight that readers will come away with renewed appreciation of the ease with which Davies routinely transformed his sometimes erudite passions into delightful entertainments. -- The New York Times Book Review

Diane Cole

. . .the book in thoroughly entertaining fashion acquaints us with Davies's expansive erudition and gift for rendering literary and historical complexities in simple, human terms. . . .The longing of a sensitive, reflective spirit for a more soulful age is detectable again and again in these essays. . .Canada's own literary reputation got an immeasurable boost with the addition of Davies to the library. -- The New York Times

Peter Marks

On the evidence of his immense legacy in print, the late novelist Davies was a man of profound artistic appetite; this, the second posthumous collection of his criticism, shares the exuberant and casual erudition of the first (The Merry Heart, 1997). The material here, most of it previously unpublished, was culled by the author's wife and daughter from his vast archive of speeches, interviews, articles, and errata, including excerpts from the copious diaries he kept throughout his life. Though the majority of pieces deal with the theater, Davies, like George Bernard Shaw, with whom he enjoyed much fruitful contact over the years, cultivated a dynamic relationship to music, and the ruminations on offer here attest to the depth of his engagement. Of Verdi's 'Rigoletto' and distaste for fine verse that would distract from his music, he provocatively notes that "the inferiority of what he made his librettists produce from the bleeding ruins of 'Macbeth' and 'Othello' is proof of his musical genius, but certainly not of his literary taste," praising the crudity of its melodrama as essential to the composer's intent. Elsewhere we encounter subtle observations on the psychology of folk music, the performance style of renowned pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch, for whose daughter the author held a deep affection, even a musical ghost story that Davies wrote for the Young People's Theatre in Toronto. His remarkably droll humor is on display here, most notably in a letter, from fictional 'necromantic suppliers' friars Bacon and Bungay, to Tanya Moiseiwitsch, director of the Stratford Festival Theatre in Davies's native Canada, offering to sell the eclectic ingredients necessary to perform thefamous witches' scene in 'Macbeth,' part of which was omitted during the festival's 1962 production of that play. Lovingly collected, these scatterings of Davies's singular talent are typically abundant and a welcome addition to a corpus like no other in contemporary literature.

Kirkus Reviews