Word: eroica
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...free park-concert series, and by dusk something like 90,000 people had spread blankets and set up camp chairs around the park's Sheep Meadow. It was possibly the biggest crowd ever to attend a symphony concert, and it listened enraptured as Beethoven's Eroica and Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps filled the evening...
...Eroica, made in 1957 by Polish Director Andrzej Munk, who died in a 1961 auto crash, reaches the U.S. with a reputation as a classic. But Munk's film stands up less well than Ozu's under the glare of posthumous appraisal. It looks like a roughing out of the masterwork that it was meant to be-one angry young Pole's bitter, blackly comic jeer at wartime myths of courage and honor...
Munk started out to make a trilogy but for some reason had to pare Eroica down to the less esthetic form of a double episode. The first, or scherzo, movement begins during the disastrous Warsaw uprising of 1944, when Polish patriots attacked their German oppressors, expecting aid from Russian forces that lay watchfully beyond the Vistula until the city was destroyed. In this film, the reluctant Reds are pretty much ignored. Munk's antihero (Edward Dziewonski) is a self-seeking womanizer who cynically boasts that he survived the occupation by "buying and selling." He shares his easy...
Though rich in startling, unsentimental detail, Eroica's disillusioned view of history never comes to wider focus upon a compelling character or a whole truth. Against the background of Poland in 1957, however, its very ambiguity is provocative-partly an elegy for individualism, partly an indictment of a people destined to trade old masters...
...like." And he doesn't. In fact, for 35 years, Scherchen repeatedly refused invitations to conduct in the U.S. because the programs offered were too conventional for his tastes. "There is an extraordinary prejudice in America," he said, "to do works of commercial interest. Beethoven's 'Eroica,' Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique' -fine music, but I've done them before. I desire to do things of special interest...