Word: berliner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mendelssohn grew up in Berlin, but that city was not always kind to him. Because he was born a Jew, the Nazis did their best to expunge his name, and his elegant, sweet, highly uncontroversial works, from Germany between 1933 and 1945. What happened thereafter was odd if not downright shameful. Mendelssohn's name remained forgotten in postwar Germany, his music rarely played. Even his grave, in the Mendelssohn family plot, was all but lost amidst the rubble and weeds in Berlin's Holy Trinity Cemetery...
...Army sergeant hunted it up, and cleared away the mess. Since then Mendelssohn's grave has become a musical shrine. Today Berliners, East and West alike, are enjoying a month-long festival of the composer's music to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Mendelssohn's death in 1847 at age 38. Herbert von Karajan led the Berlin Philharmonic down the high-flavored paths of the Scotch Symphony. The Radio Symphony Orchestra of Berlin gave the first major performance in 149 years of Mendelssohn's early (but mature) String Symphony No. 10. Even his mammoth oratorios were...
Mendelssohn did not have to work, but his family believed in industry. Declining a permanent chair at the university in Berlin, Felix in 1835 took a paying post as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Dictatorial, high-strung and charismatic, Mendelssohn demanded absolute obedience from his players and in the process raised the level of orchestral playing in Leipzig, Germany, and throughout Europe to new highs. He also changed the entire look of German symphonic life by using Mozart and Beethoven as the backbone of the repertory (instead of local celebrities like Anton Eberl and Karl Reissiger). Haydn...
...second period, a sort of architect's odyssey, began in 1928, when he left the Bauhaus to set up his own practice in Berlin. The school had pioneered in what is now known as the "international style" of building-lean, elegant structures whose interior steel skeletons allowed architects to create airy and light façades of glass. Breuer took this cold idiom and domesticated it in his first building, a house in Wiesbaden. Flat-topped, generously windowed and raised on stilts above the ground, it used contrasted materials to give a feeling of warmth and porches to extend...
...there were few jobs to be had in Depression-worn Berlin, so Breuer moved on to Zurich and then to England. There, he joined a pioneer modernist, London Architect F.R.S. Yorke, and designed in 1936 a small completely innovative pavilion at an exhibition in Bristol. Its taut glass juxtaposed with romantically rough walls of stone, it enclosed a beautifully proportioned space, and architects everywhere began to talk about Breuer. Even more striking was a project for the "Civic Center of the Future" that contained a lively assortment of innovative building shapes-Y-shaped, stepped-back and cantilevered structures, slabs, buildings...