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The Best Films of Our Years is an affectionate and witty traversal
of the history of the movies year-by-year by an author whose style
has been called "finely crafted" (America), "highly readable"
(Choice), and "often irreverently amusing" (Opera News). In the
1970s, when he was lecturing on film, Father Owen Lee was able to
speak with and learn from such movie people as Pauline Kael, Robert
Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Roberto Rossellini. In this book
he provides thumbnail reviews of ten -- arguably the best ten --
movies of each year from 1935 (when he began his movie going) to
the present. There is a preliminary section commenting on fifty
important films that preceded 1935. And there is a closing section
with longer chapters on "the ten best films of all our years,"
among them Grand Illusion, Rashomon, and Lawrence of Arabia. The
book's title rings a change on William Wyler's The Best Years of
Our Lives (1946).
"A Book of Hours" is a departure for Father Lee - a personal
memoir, cast in the form of a secular breviary, that recreates a
year Father Lee spent teaching at an American college campus in
Rome over a quarter century ago. The book draws together in an
intricate web of refracting relationships the three great loves of
Father Lee's life: opera, literature, and his life and work as a
priest. A Eurorail pass allowed him to visit all the great opera
houses of Europe, which in turn reflected on his teaching in the
classroom during the week: Homer and Virgil, Whitman and Rilke. And
all of this is set in the context of a personal crisis - impending
hearing loss, theological doubts, and the celibate's inevitable
regret, at age forty, that he cannot share his remaining years with
children of his own. In this inspiring and beautifully crafted
book, Father Lee shows us how religious faith and a deeply
humanistic culture need never be enemies, but rather can be a
source of mutual enrichment.
(Limelight). For well over twenty years, M. Owen Lee has been
offering intermission talks during the Saturday afternoon Texaco
Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, which now reach countries on six
continents. In this book, Father Lee covers various operas of
Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Richard Strauss, as well as a
selection of French operas, including Faust, Carmen and Les Contes
d'Hoffman. In all, his repertory contains 23 operatic masterworks,
to all of which he brings insight, learning and the most infectious
enthusiasm. "One just cannot get enough of Father Lee's] brilliant,
stimulating, thought-provoking insights...I feel there is no one
more knowledgeable or qualified in the entire field of opera
commentary. No one." The Opera Quarterly
(Amadeus). In this volume, Father M. Owen Lee writes for the
21st-century operagoer, briskly and stylishly telling the stories
of 100 of the world's greatest music dramas from Aida to Die
Zauberflote . The stories told in music by Mozart, Wagner, Verdi,
Puccini and Strauss are brought to life here with wit, insight and
boundless enthusiasm. When compiling and composing this
pocket-sized handbook, Fr. Lee considered the unique needs of the
modern operagoer. Contemporary text-translating services have made
pure synopses somewhat redundant. Fr. Lee, therefore, has focused
his commentaries less on the comings and goings of plot than on
subtext, motivation and background information. He also suggests
his single favorite recording for each of the 100 operas discussed.
In all, he has written a guide that will prove invaluable to the
opera novice and useful even for the aficionado.
"The Olive-Tree Bed and Other Quests", the Fourth in the series of
Robson Lectures published by the University of Toronto Press, is
Owen Lee's study of the quest myth as it occurs in Homer's Odyssey,
Virgil's Aeneid, Wagner's Parsifal and Goethe's Faust. Though the
four works represent four different genres -- oral epic, written
epic, music drama, and poetic drama -- each deals with the finding
of an elusive goal attainable only by the hero called to find it.
The questing for the olive-tree bed, the Golden Bough, the Holy
Grail, and the Eternal Feminine is, at the deepest level, the
hero's search to find the meaning in his life. Though Father Lee's
lectures address critical problems in the four works, and draw to
some extent on Jungian insights, this volume is also a personal
memoir written in the belletristic style for which its author has
become known. Father Lee wears his learning lightly, and his
writing changes from chapter to chapter as it reflects, in turn,
the clarity and naive sense of wonder in Homer, the darkness and
ambivalence in Virgil, the intuitive mysticism of Wagner, and the
riotously imaginative exuberance of Goethe. Each of the four quests
comes eventually to be seen as every person's search to discover
himself -- for the journey of the hero is the myth each of us is
called to live.
(Limelight). Commentary on and a concise, lucid interpretation of
the opera world's most complex masterwork, expanded from the
author's popular intermission talks during Met Opera broadcasts.
"Anyone, whether knowledgeable or not, will profit by reading
it..." Opera Quarterly
Lee (classics, U. of Toronto) applies a Jungian approach to the
Latin poem of the earth and draws on new commentaries in English
and German Virgilians of the past. He outlines the literary and
historical background of the poem, discusses the sound of Virgil's
hexameters, treats each of the four geor
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