Word: fingal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other, I'll be famous, and if not famous, notorious." Such heady ambitions are fairly common in the young, but the Oxford undergraduate who uttered these words in 1874 got all of his wishes, and then some. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde not only achieved the most glittering renown of his era but the most abject humiliation as well. He flew higher and fell farther than any of his contemporaries, and his life had become a legend well before his death in a shabby Paris hotel in 1900. He had wrought...
...produced a full-blown work of genius at age 17 in the dazzling, quicksilver Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the most successful purely instrumental interpretation of Shakespeare ever written. Yet Mendelssohn had the emotional range to evoke the craggy, forbidding atmosphere of the Hebrides in his "Fingal's Cave" Overture, summon up the combative spirit of the Scottish highlands in his Third Symphony and capture the religious fervor of Lutheranism in the "Reformation" Symphony. His was a winning, unaffected, protean talent that, like Mozart's or Schubert's, was snuffed out too early by his death...
...nineteenth century America in academic prose that is alternately stiff and playful, making for some confusion but not obfuscating his larger interpretations. In seeking brevity, the author looks for neatly suggestive anecdotes and historical shorthands to portray his subject, and occasionally descends to awkward constructions, calling Trumball's M'Fingal a "bundle of hesitations," and stretching to describe Channing as fighting "an internal civil war that would last as long as he lived." There are also times when it seems the author reveres his subject almost unceasingly, remarking early in the biography: "William Channing's first sensation of 'the power...