Word: gustav
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Credit for the production's dramatic success belongs to Kevin Fitzpatrick, who serves as director and one third of the cast. As the manipulative Gustav, Fitzpatrick is the pivotal character in a complex triangle of love and hate. With tactful finesse, he dissects the crippled husband Adolf (Robert Ulin), laying bare a host of festering marital doubts. Ulin's nervous vulnerability seems excessive at first, and Fitzpatrick tends to be overcommanding, but as the scene progresses, the actors reveal unexpected levels of character. The surgeon reveals his own weaknesses, and the patient his strength, evoking sympathy from the audience...
...dialogue becomes as abstract and apaque as a Berginan film, but through it all the characters prevail. Fitzpatrick instills a morbidly farcical nature into Gustav which culminates in his mimicry of an epileptic seizure to horrify Adolf. Ulin carefully uses his entire body to express the helpless frustration of a man crippled physically and spiritually...
Sandage prefers to stick with measurements implying an age closer to 20 billion years. Why? He cites, among other items, his latest research into the age of great spherical clusters of stars in the halo of the Milky Way. He and Colleague Gustav Tammann found they are some 17 billion years old. Asks Sandage, with the laconic understatement of a debater who feels sure he has found the clinching argument: "Isn't it rather hard to have a universe younger than its oldest components...
...faith with Mann from the outset of his career." And where was he to find those foundations? In the lives of his colleagues and contemporaries, no matter how vulnerable they were; art was everything. Aschenbach, the enfeebled aesthete of Death in Venice (1913), for example, was modeled after Gustav Mahler, who was dying at the time. "Nothing is invented in [the story]," Mann boasted,as if the confession added to his stature as an artist...
...depth of expression rivals Brahms' more famous essays in the form. Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, the finest string-orchestra piece of the century, reaches back for inspiration to the English Renaissance, achieving a spiritual serenity rare in this age of anxiety. Gustav Hoist's The Planets is a superbly effective orchestral showpiece. And two of Benjamin Britten's major operas, Peter Grimes and Death in Venice, belong on any list of the most important modern music dramas...