Word: czech
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Some beauty-clinic owners are eager to demystify the treatments. Says Czech-born Georgette Klinger, who manufactures and sells 35 products for cleansing alone: "Magic creams don't exist. There is no magic in anything. It is absolutely not necessary to pay $100 - that's just for prestige...
...Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, has pressed this opposition role ever since he became Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 1948. When Cardinal Wojtyla joined the battle, he used his intellectual powers to persuade both disaffected liberal Catholics and Marxists to take the church seriously. The new Pope, says a Czech Jesuit in exile, has been "more dangerous for Communist countries than Cardinal Wyszynski, because he combats Marxism also on theoretical grounds, and with such success that they have been hard put to refute his arguments...
Down came the technological slogans in the square of Brno, Czechoslovakia (pop. 365,000). Up went huge posters of an intense-looking, white-haired man who could be a commanding commissar but who, in Brno at least, is more venerated than any socialist leader: Czech Composer Leoš Janáček. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of its composer's death and the 125th of his birth, Brno has opened a yearlong Janacek celebration, beginning with 27 musical events in a two-week-long gala festival. Students, soldiers and scores of foreign scholars jammed six concert halls...
...musical merit was debated for years. An ardent nationalist and legendary eccentric, Janacek composed music full of short, abrupt but harmonically lovely melodies that built from one another into a driving whole. His symphonic works called for more brass and slashing power than many an orchestra could muster. Because Czech consonant clusters are so prickly, his operas were considered hopeless tongue twisters by singers outside his country. The subjects-time warps, prison-camp life, child murder-left audiences pining for the heraldic posturing more familiar to opera. "Atrocious drama," huffed one New York critic after a 1931 performance of From...
Much of the talent was from Czechoslovakia: the Brno State Theater, which originally staged most of Janáček's operas; the Brno State Philharmonic; the Czech Philharmonic; scores of folk singers and choirs. The Czech Philharmonic, one of the grander Old World orchestras, offered a smoothed-out, spruced-up version of the composer's music, while the more regional Brno orchestra left the burr in Janáček's rough edges. Lacking singers of international caliber, the Brno ensemble fared poorly in such star vehicles as The Makropoulos Affair. But Mr. Brou...