Word: deathly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...writing the concerto, Hungarian Bela Bartok knew he was racing against death. Hating to waste one moment of time or one inch of score paper, the poverty-stricken composer wrote in a highly individualized musical shorthand, sometimes indicating whole passages with one or two pothooks, often squeezing in bars off the clef-at the edges and bottom of the sheet-without even indicating where they belonged. His most puzzling short cut was in the correction of notes: instead of erasing, Bartok grafted his improvement right onto the original...
After holding the confusing scraps of paper for two years after Bartok's death, his executor handed them over to Bartok's close friend and fellow composer Tibor Serly, who had earlier spent four months of skull-cracking labor trying to decipher the piece. Serly later said: "No man ever had such a task in his life . . . In order to finish this work as Bartok would have finished it, I had to put myself in a dead man's mind." Serly completed the score for viola (after rejecting the notion of adapting it for the more popular...
...that he feared insanity); on a mountain path near Burlingame, Calif. A crack artilleryman, Texas-born General Moore built up a record (better than 10%) average of antiaircraft destruction on Corregidor. With General Wainwright, theater commander, he surrendered the island to the Japanese and set out on the Bataan Death March to spend three years in Japanese prisons. After the war, he was Army commander in the Pacific, retired eight months ago after 40 years' service...
Stonyhurst's sager Jesuits were more up to date in their psychology. They appointed Charles school ratcatcher-and so conquered his peculiar heart that he wore the Stonyhurst school uniform ("blue-tailed coat with gold buttons and a check waistcoat") on all special occasions until his death at the age of 83. Unfortunately, ratcatching also served to nourish the largest bee that ever buzzed in Charles Waterton's bonnet, i.e., his conviction that the common brown rat had been introduced to England by Protestant King George I. Thenceforth, the exterminating of the "Hanoverian rat" furnished the Squire with...
Deadly Weapon. In London, Daniel Raven was convicted of beating his father-in-law to death with the butt end of a television aerial...