Word: bittersweet
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...cultural process that changed Louis Armstrong from jazz's first great improviser to a grinning but unartistic national hero, then muses briefly on the corrupting influence that so often accompanies success in the arts. And Wilson has produced, in only nine pages, the gem of the collection: a bittersweet portrait of Fats Waller, an obliging soul who sacrificed his love and talent for serious (jazz and classical) music to appease the pop taste for stylized treatments of trite show tunes...
English companies provided a pair of bittersweet surprises for the U.S. last week, both involving venerable names, one American and one British...
...Hedda's hats. New closings tend to be happier than old ones, with boy getting girl after all, or star surviving rather than perishing. In Apache (1954), Burt Lancaster was first killed, then allowed to live on. What's Up Doc? (1972) initially ended with a bittersweet goodbye between Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand at an airport, but by the time the film was released Barbra was on the plane and cuddling with Ryan. Irene Dunne died heroically in A Guy Named Joe (1943) and joined Spencer Tracy in heaven, but came back to life after...
That night a papal sing-along for young people occurred. Before he put aside his prepared text to lead the music, the Pope lectured his audience on Polish Catholic culture. "Be nobly proud of it," he said. "Multiply it. Hand it on to future generations." A bittersweet moment came as John Paul led the young people in a mountaineer's ballad: "Don't you miss your country, your fields and pastures, your valleys and streams?" In the song, the mountaineer cannot return because he has been called to heaven, and no one missed the parallel with "Lolek" Wojtyla...
...story of Alceste, a man torn between hatred of the world's deceit and flattery and his own love for a deceitful, flattering widow named Célimène, Molière pressed poetic comedy and satiric wit to the edge of tears. Le Misanthrope is his bittersweet masterpiece. In a comedy of manners, Alceste's notion of telling the truth himself on all occasions and correcting the chicanery of the age clearly marks him as a crackpot bound for grief. But as the play proceeds and the caesuras required of French classic verse occasionally become pregnant...