Word: felix
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...America seems a trifle small to qualify as a monopoly. Yet for nearly two more years, or until Detroit is ready with its own rotary engine, Mazda will be the only car sold in the U.S. with the rotary: a power system, first designed by West Germany's Felix Wankel, that is half the size of the conventional piston engine and has only three moving parts, v. 166 in a piston engine with comparable horsepower. In the best tradition of U.S. monopolists, the Japanese-owned car maker is making all the hay it can while the sun is shining...
...prodigious powers as a musical extemporizer. When he was only eleven, none other than Goethe himself asked the boy to play a certain fugue of Bach's. Unable to recall it all, Felix improvised as he went along, weaving contrapuntal lines into a heavily brocaded baroque fabric that was good enough, at least, to convince Goethe. That was one of the few instances, however, when Mendelssohn's memory failed him. Shortly after Beethoven's Ninth Symphony came out, Mendelssohn, then 15, could play it all on the piano without a book...
...Felix made the grand tour. Starting out in 1829, he traveled for three years. His greatest successes came in London, for the English liked his music as well as his charm. Queen Victoria and her consort spent many a private evening with him, with Mendelssohn playing Albert's new pipe organ and the prince literally pulling out all the stops...
Mendelssohn did not have to work, but his family believed in industry. Declining a permanent chair at the university in Berlin, Felix in 1835 took a paying post as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Dictatorial, high-strung and charismatic, Mendelssohn demanded absolute obedience from his players and in the process raised the level of orchestral playing in Leipzig, Germany, and throughout Europe to new highs. He also changed the entire look of German symphonic life by using Mozart and Beethoven as the backbone of the repertory (instead of local celebrities like Anton Eberl and Karl Reissiger). Haydn...
...played, he taught, he administered, he composed. He also devoted much time to the charming of ladies, in ways that apparently did not develop into bona fide affairs. The real love of his life was his older sister Fanny. As children they were inseparable, sometimes too much so for Felix. "Is the string on which I flutter long, but unbreakable?" he once wrote her. Although each later married happily, they remained the closest of confidants, especially on artistic matters. Upon hearing the news of Fanny's premature death of a stroke in 1847, Mendelssohn himself collapsed. He died five...