Word: chutzpah
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only Peter Skolnick (who directed this disaster) had injected some buoyancy, some life, some fun, some chutzpah-he could have saved the whole shebang. Then, what the hell, we wouldn't have cared about the squeaky horns, cracking tenors, dump jokes, flickering spotlights, missed cues. We wouldn't have minded when an actor got stuck in the safety-pinned curtain, or when another knocked over a teapot. Oh for goodness sake-even a little filth would have helped...
...Dust. But if Herzog is an emotional deadbeat, other characters have plenty of chutzpah. Herzog's wife Madeleine is the perfect man killer with her cold, carnivorous smile, her facial tic and gnawed nails; she strips Herzog of his bank account during the day, ridicules him into impotence at night; after meals she is in the habit of applying her lipstick while gazing at her reflection in a knife blade. Her lover, Valentine Gersbach, is an ex-disk jockey who loves to "yuk it up" with intellectuals, gives Herzog fatherly lectures on how to get along with his wife...
Taking such a sharp and familiar tone with God would be called chutzpah in Yiddish, but what Leonard Bernstein intended for his Third Symphony was a musical statement of Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Bernstein's Kaddish was commissioned for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 75th anniversary eight years ago, but it was not until three years ago that Lenny was gripped with "this horrible sense of imminent destruction," and finally buckled down to work. Last week Boston finally played its Kaddish...
With five more Met performances ahead of him and the strong echo of his successes with the Philharmonic behind, Maazel is full of the old chutzpah again."I must say,'' he says eagerly, ''that I'm proud of what I've done, not only for myself but for the image of the American artist abroad. Forget this expatriate business-the thing that matters is that one of my concerts in Prague, say, does more for good will than years and years of propagandizing by the embassy. People from the embassy have told me this...