Word: amsterdam
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...tidy Dutch were checking over the books of Amsterdam's famed Concertgebouw Orchestra. If everything was in order, Conductor Eduard van Beinum's musicians would get their annual subsidy as usual. But this time everything was distinctly not in order: Van Beinum's predecessor, the great Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, was still down on the books for 10,000 guilders ($3,760) a year, even though he had been sent into musical exile in 1945 for collaborating with the Nazis...
Nobody had quarreled with the annuity when it had been granted to aging, cello-sized (5 ft. 4 in.) Conductor Mengelberg in September 1939. Through 44 years, except for stretches in New York (1921-29) and London, he had devoted himself to pounding and polishing Amsterdam's orchestra into one of the two or three finest in the world...
Last week, Amsterdam's councilmen made short work of lopping off the annuity. But to Willem Mengelberg, a senile remnant of musical greatness, it made small difference. Because of Dutch currency restrictions, he had received only about a quarter of his stipend anyway; most of his money came from Swiss investments...
...press of the world had been interested in Amsterdam, reported The Netherlands' Dr. W. A. Visser 't Hooft, general secretary to the World Council, but not all of the press comment had been favorable. Some papers, said Dr. Visser 't Hooft, had criticized Amsterdam severely for being "a bunch of left-wing socialists talking like regular revolutionaries." Others had sneered at "those bourgeois who will never learn that the world is moving on." The Soviet press had attacked the council as "a new powerful center of a political church." Commented Visser 't Hooft: "They...
...through reading religious books in his mother's library while he was hiding out from the Germans during the occupation. In the end he began to feel that he was divinely inspired to do something about it. Groskamp first appealed to the World Council of Churches meeting in Amsterdam last summer; then he lodged his carefully drawn legal brief with the Supreme Court of Israel...