Word: beethoven
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...public, to the composer, and to himself, each of which must be fulfilled without infringing on the others. First of all, a conductor is bound to play a number of works from the standard repertoire, but he must not, certainly, subject his audience to a steady diet of Beethoven's Fifth, Tchaikowski's Pathetique, and the New World Symphony. Of course, there are always younger listeners for whom a playing of these favorites is a new and exciting experience. On the other hand, conductors do not take enough for granted, such as the fact that the present-day concert audience...
Long-distance autopsies are risky. French Scholar Denis Saurat enraged the high-minded by "demonstrating" that blind John Milton (like deaf Ludwig van Beethoven) suffered from hereditary syphilis. Diagnostician Moorman finds Milton tuberculous. Other famous consumptives: Pope, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Descartes, Balzac, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Chekhov, Dostoevski, a brow-wrinkling list of other writers and thinkers. Doctors suspect that tuberculosis develops genius because 1) apprehension of death inspires a burning awareness of life's beauty, significance, transience, 2) the bacillus breeds restlessness and an intoxicated hypersensitiveness...
Speaking of music in wartime, British Poet Stephen Spender reported in his otherwise literate September Journal: "[T. S.] Eliot said that he did not care to listen to Beethoven so much as formerly just now. We both agreed on Bach and Gluck...
...Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major (Saxon State Orchestra, Karl Bohm conducting, with Walter Gieseking; Columbia: 8 sides). But for the still-smoldering fire of two grand old men of pianism (Josef Hofmann and Sergei Rachmaninoff) French-born, 44-year-old Walter Gieseking would be ranked by most connoisseurs as today's No. i pianist. Here Pianist Gieseking gives Beethoven's most lyric piano concerto its finest recording to date...
...kind eyes and a soft heart. When he returned to Chicago with his recordings, so depressed would he feel about the underprivileged folk among whom he traveled that it would take two or three nights listening to the Civic Opera before he felt right again. For Mr. Kapp understood Beethoven as well as 3-woogie...