Word: ghoulish
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...Jean-Baptiste Lully, court musician to Louis XIV, was a classical beginning far off the beaten track. Then there was Gabriel Faure, the French man who transmitted his fragile, elusive style to the more popular Maurice Ravel. Every song had its mood subtly, surely conveyed. Toward the end a ghoulish piece by Modernist Alban Berg (Wozzeck) was done so effectively that a sudden wail which came from the audience struck people at first as an overtone which be longed there. But it was a listener taken with a fit of epilepsy...
While hardly approaching the ghoulish Intensity or earthy intimacy of the stage play from which it was adapted, "The Spider" fares acceptably under the auspices of Edmund Lowe and Lois Moran. Perhaps somewhat unsuited by nature to the role of a shrewd magician. Mr. Lowe maintains his usual affable suavity despite the fact that little chance is provided for humor. In general, the production suffers from the result of being little more than the photographing of a good stage play...
Lytton Strachey, who started a new school of biography, is still headmaster of it. Learned dilettante of history, he is no ghoulish exhumer of dead facts but a mildly malicious wizard who summons very lifelike ghosts. Says he: "The virtues of a metaphysician are the vices of a historian. A generalized, colorless, unimaginative view of things is admirable when one is considering the law of causality, but one needs something else if one has to describe Queen Elizabeth." That Something Else, as every Stracheyite knows, Strachey...
...Farrell spoke with mill terms as well as mill frankness. But his big points were dramatically clear, namely: 1) That steel companies are engaged in a mean and vicious war of price-cutting; 2) that buyers of steel (e. g. the automobile manufacturers) are demoralizing he industry by their "ghoulish glee" in forcing prices down; 3) that if insensate price-cutting does not quickly stop, worse conditions will follow. Extracts from the Farrell speech...
...There were no conventional harmonies, no set songs. Baritone Ivan Ivantzoff (Wozzeck) sometimes spoke, sometimes sang his lines. Soprano Anne Roselle (Marie, Wozzeck's mistress) had music so hideously difficult that it defied full, smooth tones. Robert Edmond Jones's simple, color-splashed sets had more general appeal: a ghoulish eye set in a screen for the doctor's examining office; the elongated shadow of a stack of guns for the soldier's barracks; a festoon of colored lights for a beer garden; a street in the town all angles and planes...