The "immediate, dramatic quality" of the "kind of musical equivalent of the Passion Play" relies on the setting of the interaction between the historical persons (Jesus, Pilate, Peter) and the crowd ("soldiers, priests, and populace").
Werfel thought of the work as a play with incidental music and wrote the script without consulting Weill, who independently began to envision a Jewish equivalent of Bach's Passions or Handel's "Messiah".
If the rest of us are going to shake up the planetary gestalt, our equivalent currency is bodies — and the passion, spirit, and creativity they contain.
That instinct toward the rare and precious, coupled with a childhood love of cooking fostered by his Texan grandfather, culminated in an early passion for diamonds' culinary equivalent.
Every now and then actors come along who are the television equivalent of Marmite: those who love them do so with unabashed passion; those who hate them are equally vocal – and the two sides will never agree.
But the information is presented without much passion or humor, the magazine equivalent of a polite but chilly air kiss.
There had been no British equivalent to the French Revolution; much of the passion to make the world new found its way into the new world of science.
Yet this story of a guild of mastersingers in the medieval German city, simple tradesmen by profession but artists by passion, moves with the Wagnerian equivalent of superb comic timing.
Park films the story with the visual equivalent of purple prose, a kind of eye-rollingly rhetorical passion in love with its own gleaming, glowing rhapsody that suggests precisely the sumptuous indulgences on which the tale runs.
The Simpson trial was the real-life, television-age equivalent of a dime novel, with a possible crime of passion and a football-hero defendant, not to mention all the fancy lawyers money could buy.
(I should note that, all the same, I have battled through it, behind closed if not locked doors, without equivalent drama. Incompetent playing – mine – may have been the passion killer).
