Word: flatness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...opera at Vienna's Theater an der Wien was a flop. The orchestra fumbled, the soprano bumbled, the tenor went flat. Critics dismissed the score as long, repetitive and gnarled with outlandish complexities. The production closed after three nights, reopened the following year, folded again after four more performances. The talented 35-year-old composer set the work aside for eight years. Then he undertook extensive revisions. "Hardly a musical number has been left unchanged," he wrote to a Vienna newspaper, "ard more than half the opera was composed anew." Finally, in May 1814, Ludwig van Beethoven...
...governor, much less performed them in any fashion, liberal or conservative. He is now what he was as a campaigner and as a restaurant owner: a little man who shakes hands with the small-time businessman and the white worker. He delivers a lot more of those flat and amateurish speeches then he did before becoming governor, but otherwise he is the same. He still spends one entire day a week seeing people who want to bring their garbage difficulties of personal problems to him. He gets immense satisfaction from playing Santa Claus for the people of Georgia...
Every pianist, violinist and 'cellist with a yen for chamber music has at one time or another chugged through the Schubert Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat. It's hazards of technique and intonation are notorious, but somehow the beauty of the work transcends the most adverse of circumstances and comes through in spite of wrong notes, shaky ensemble, and sick intervals...
...heavy, Robards turns out to be strictly middleweight. His lean features and nasal drawl are foreign to the squat Neapolitan hustler. Occasionally, someone in the cast does lend an air of authenticity, notably Ralph Meeker as Moran and David Canary as a flat-faced machine gunner who seems to have stepped out of a lineup onto the set. But all too often the period costumes and a fleet of chuffing phaetons, landaus and flivvers look like the only genuine articles on view...
...pieces that make up Paul Bowles's first collection of stories in 17 years read like obituaries of the soul. His characters, robbed of purpose, their spirits rubbed flat, move zombielike through exquisitely desolate landscapes -Moroccan ghettos, Algerian deserts, New York subway tunnels. Displaced in the present, they have vague pasts and menacing futures; sighing despair, they search for something unnameable...