Word: diletanti
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...other two works on the program were Hayden's D major quartet, Opus 20, No. 4, and Beethoven's F minor quartet, Opus 95. The performance of the Beethoven was occasionally uncoordinated, rarely clear, and never balanced. Haydn, as Temianka remarked, wrote for the diletanti of the local aristocracy, and in fact, the performance sounded quite dilettantish: the meters of the first and third movements were ambiguous and the 'cello muddy. But in the slow movement, Haydn dispensed with any melodrama or surprises. While the movement's great serene flow, like the cadence of a sonnet, revealed no secrets...
...would not be diletanti we are thus of necessity specialists. No modern system of distribution denies this. It attempts instead of counteract the consequent but inevitable danger of narrowness (which Mr. Burke quite properly emphasizes) by insuring the student against intolerant ignorance of other fields than his own, and by insisting on breadth of culture as the best basis for concentration. But if Mr. Burke's hypothetical undergraduate, with his atrophied power of choice, necessitates nothing less than a complete retraction of elective ideals, rather than the retention of their best elements in a synthetic reform, the whole problem...
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