“After all, what interest one may have in the play lies in the excellence of the translation, for, as a play, there is no blood in it.”
+ − Boston Transcript p6 S 8 ’20 270w
“The dramatic form, unfortunately for the translator, is only skin-deep. Essential drama, apart from its verbal expression, loses nothing in a new language: poetry, and ‘The death of Titian’ in particular, lose most everything.”
− Dial 69:322 S ’20 50w
“This group of monologues of the old master’s pupils gathered about his death-bed possessed the ecstatic phrasing and the comparative aimlessness of youthful genius. Over all there is a blue-bronze atmosphere which John Heard has not completely lost in his English.” E. E. H.
+ − Freeman 1:478 Jl 28 ’20 150w
“Hofmannsthal fashioned those incomparable verses (which Mr Heard has sensitively read but quite failed to render) because the very pang of beauty wrung them from him. No wonder that such verses are not written today either in Vienna or elsewhere.” Ludwig Lewisohn
+ − Nation 111:18 Jl 3 ’20 110w
“The slow movement and sluggish dialog give to this little fragment a funereal as well as a memorial aspect. There is too little of the pageant, too much of the orator. Words cloud illusions and crowd out the sympathetic play of the individual imagination.”