Word: florid
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MAINE Senator Edmund Sixtus Muskie looks and sounds like the prototype of the ancestral Down-Easter. Craggy-faced, big-boned and monumentally tall (he is 6 ft. 4 in.), he displays the New England legislator's characteristic attention to detail and distaste for florid rhetoric. It was hardly foreseeable before last week that the Democratic vice-presidential nominee?who is in fact the son of a Polish-born tailor?would be matched against a Republican opposite number from Maryland with a curiously similar background. Muskie and Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's running mate, are both sons of immigrants. Both grew...
Almost any photograph of a Northern European city street scene taken around 1900 shows how decisively art nouveau (or its German version, Jugendstil) permeated the Mauve Decade. As the first art style since the Industrial Revolution to integrate every phase of design, its florid, free-flowing lines ornamented buildings and posters, park benches and Metro stations, Tiffany glass and Liberty silks. Yet few styles have had a shorter life. It achieved its purplest popularity between 1895 and 1900, was fading fast by 1914. With the advent of the machined precision of the 1920s Bauhaus modernism, handcrafted art nouveau became...
Employing a purposely florid Victorian style, Friedensohn has painted a series of pictures that re-create the crime, diagram the paths of the bullets entering the body, offer a stiff-necked portrait gallery of the prisoner's-or possibly the victim's-family. Inaccurate and overwrought newspaper accounts of the murder are evoked by distorted and double-image pictures of it (one on a giant television screen). Doctors presiding at the operating table are shown poised over the body like apostles at the Last Supper. "Assassination," explains Friedensohn. "is like patricide, deicide. It provokes a religious...
DONIZETTI: L'ELISIR D'AMORE (2 LPs; Angel). The Elixir of Love is an 1832 comic opera that is a delightful collection of bouncy silliness couched in florid melody. Mirella Freni and Nicolai Gedda reproduce their entrancing Metropolitan Opera performances of two seasons ago, and they are complemented by the astonishing bass of Renato Capecchi, who combines unbelievable agility with mahogany-like richness in the role of a quack selling a love potion...
Compared with Beethoven's more polished, rounded-and, some say, compromised-version of 1814, the original Fidelio turned out to be expansive and florid, bursting through its forms with a driving force that the composer was only partially able to control. Its heavy orchestration has a strain of wildness that Beethoven tamed in his later revisions; its soaring vocal lines, which he later modified, make harsh demands on singers. In all, there are significant differences from the 1814 revision on 134 of the vocal score's 276 pages...