Word: adrian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ostensibly Faustus is the biography-in-progress of a fictitious German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who was born in 1885 and died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind...
Mocking Genius. Mann has chosen no conventionally flashy music-hall prodigy for his case history of a genius. Adrian Leverkühn, as his friend Zeitblom remembers him, was a brilliant, mocking, arrogant schoolboy who, even in his early teens, was constantly throwing off deep remarks. Sample: "Technique and comfort-in that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization-in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture...
...uncle, with whom he lived as a schoolboy, was a dealer in musical instruments. Before long, Adrian had secretly mastered the keyboard, discovered double counterpoint on his own and become the apple of the local music teacher's eye. Author Mann, who played the violin as a boy, held long conversations with his friends Igor Stravinsky and Bruno Walter as "research" for Faustus, and has packed his book with an impressive and at times annoying display of musical knowledge that will be over the heads of most readers...
This week, in the nation's first statewide election this year, Maine's citizens elected Representative Margaret Chase Smith to the Senate over the Democrats' Dr. Adrian H. Scolten, a Portland dermatologist and political newcomer. Trim, handsome Mrs. Smith, who looks as most clubwomen would like to look, becomes the first woman to be elected to the Senate entirely on her own merits...
...first set against Adrian Quist, Ted Schroeder found a cannonball service ("I don't know where it came from, but I'm glad it came") and the violently accurate volley that had deserted him all season, and won 6-3. In the second set, he lapsed into his old erratic play, lost 4-6 to Quist's heady tennis. In the third game of the third set, Quist moved in to the net, won a brilliant volley, but ended up on the seat of his pants. The crowd's applause turned to "Aah" (Forest Hills...