Word: beethovens
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...look on while they rape his wife. Alex's sole link with humanity seems to be his love for "Ludwig van," especially the Choral Ninth. While his pee and em (parents) are at work, he perversely violates two small girls (Alex himself is only 15) while Beethoven gives out with the Ninth on the record player...
...later story is "like tragic" and expounds a bitter moral theorem. He is jailed and selected by the state authorities for Reclamation Treatment. Under drugs and with his eyelids clipped open, he is forced to watch an endless succession of films showing Japanese and Nazi tortures while Beethoven supplies the sound track. Then, conditioned like Pavlov's dog, Alex is released on society, guaranteed to vomit at the sight of violence or the sound of Beethoven. As one of his brainwashing group observes, "He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral...
Much of the material is too well known already (e.g. "The Vicar of Bray" and Richard II's lament about the "death of kings") and most of the rest had been better left in darkest obscurity (to wit, "A Ballad to an Absent Friend" by Prince Albert, and Beethoven's variations on "God Save The King...
...provincialism in Richter's earlier style had at first deterred critics from such bold appraisals. For years he was known beyond the Soviet bloc only in legends that told of a pianistic Paul Bunyan who played 120 concerts a year, every one of them good enough to make Beethoven weep. When he appeared at last-46 years old and bald-his mastery of the Russian technique was so impressive that he made its vices into astonishing virtues...
...Beauty Part, by S. J. Perelman. People used to listen to a Beethoven symphony without trying to identify with the composer. But in the age of do-it-yourself culture, everyman is his own self-discovered, self-expressing genius, though the self being expressed is frequently about as artistic as a defective drain. This is the play Humorist S. J. Perelman apparently began to write, and there are hints of it still ("Every housewife in the country has a novel under her apron"). Followed through, this might have led him to a bitingly comic examination of a serious question...