Word: fervid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
TELEVISION. After a numbing 110 hours of often fervid debate, the Senate passed a bill to sell the country's oldest and biggest state-owned television network, TF1. If the National Assembly approves, France will become the first European country to privatize a public TV network. The measure, charged Communist Senator Charles Lederman, is "the same as if we auctioned off Versailles, the Louvre and the Comedie Francaise." Culture and Communications Minister Francois Leotard vehemently disagreed. "TF1 is badly run," he said. "It does not compete with foreign programs and is absolutely incapable of exporting its own productions...
...determinedly circling suburban high school tracks or pacing through city parks. Most Americans did not suppose these were the harbingers of a U.S. craze. But by the end of the 1970s joggers were everywhere, all seemingly in training for the marathon. Other citizens, plunging into alternate activities, were equally fervid. Swimmers boasted of laps completed, cyclists of long-distance touring, and weight lifters of pounds pressed. Today Americans live in a land where fit is proper. Strut your sweat. The majority, who remain woefully unfit, are now the ones who feel out of step; shamefacedly, they even outfit the body...
Liszt tapped another fervid source of the legend in two episodes of Faust by the mad Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau, who wrote his own treatment of the demoniac tale. Nocturnal Procession, a stately, spooky march of Gregorian- chanting penitents, is one of the composer's most original and beautiful creations. The Dance in the Village Inn, better known as the First Mephisto Waltz, sweeps forward with a cloven-hoofed fiddler calling the tune...
That radiance is fully celebrated by Levine. At 41 already a brilliant conductor of Parsifal, he views Lohengrin as a kind of musical prequel to Wagner's last work. He adopted a daringly slow _ tempo for the Act I prelude, letting it burn with a fervid religiosity, but gave the chorus and onstage "brass players thrilling free rein in the opera's frequent boisterous moments. Levine has mastered the sense of timelessness so crucial to successful Wagner performances in general, and static works like Lohengrin in particular; one looks forward to the day, two seasons hence, when...
...fields prospering under the sun and remembers what it was like at the beginning. How, as a skinny youth barely 20, he left his parents in Poland and in 1932 came to what was then called Palestine, carrying the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland. How he and other fervid believers founded the Negba kibbutz in 1939, digging wells and building huts on an arid patch 30 miles south of Tel Aviv. How he and his comrades, armed only with Molotov cocktails and a handful of shells, held off a dozen Egyptian tanks in 1948, that exhilarating year in which...