Word: burghers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...once made a burgher feel big to buy operas and plays and for a particular evening he commissioned one of each. The singers arrived, the actors arrived, but the burgher wanted his art short. Opera plus play would take too long so he ordered them run off together. On such a farcical notion did Moliere make his Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Hugo von Hofmannsthal used it for Ariadne auf Naxos for which Richard Strauss wrote the music. Last week the Strauss-von-Hofmannsthal opus, given first in Stuttgart in 1912 with Maria Jeritza, had its U. S. première-with...
...well-known instance of the way a man wrote his name into history by the alternative of excess is that which came to pass one day in the German city of Rotenburg. General Tilly was about to sack the place when he was arrested by the spectacle of a burgher emptying a tall stein of beer in one prodigious gulp. In his admiration the General spared the town and wooden figures in the clock tower re-enact the Meistertrunk each noon to gaping posterity in the square below. Jeremiah, MacSweeney, and a large company of well known hermits...
...silence and "poor elocution" soon induced him to abandon that career. For many a year he lived and wrote in the ruins of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandville, Normandy. Except for "an original look expressing his inner field of serene vision," he is in appearance a prosperous, healthy burgher of Ghent. Tall, thickset, he boxes, cycles, shoots, rows. He has been variously called "the Edison of the immaterial world" and "the Belgian Shakespeare...
...insist on walking through the gardens in the role of an Italian tyrant, discoursing the while on the greatness and license of the court of the Medicis. After puffing up the stairs, admittedly the stout English gentleman again, a great Flemish tapestry room would transform him into a portly burgher. Yet the sight of an Elizabethan fireplace would make him the happiest of all. Sinking naturally into the nearest eighteenth century chair, despite signs to the contrary, he would muse away an hour culled from England's past...
...quiet finally restored at midnight, when all but five of the escaped herd had been captured, was a troubled quiet. Many a worthy burgher slept out the night behind doors well-bolted and barricaded and with reason. Even the old fashioned distinction between Cambridge proper and Cambridge improper has vanished. What are we to expect next...