Word: johann
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...successive days last week the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach hovered in the wings of Manhattan's Town Hall. To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the great composer's birth, Pianist Harold Samuel gave six Bach programs which, added together, took more than twelve hours. When the marathon was ended no member of the audience questioned Samuel's reputation as the prime interpreter of Bach's piano music. The 55-year-old Briton set about his task modestly, unaffectedly. At the piano he made a bulky unimpressive figure, seemed all forehead and shirt front...
...white folk penetrate 200 miles into French Equatorial Africa to the settlement of Lambarene on the sluggish River Ogowe. Such strangers as do turn up there are mightily surprised to hear, among the night sounds of the jungle, an organ crashing out one of Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccatas and Fugues. Albert Schweitzer is no more famed as a man of God than he is as a man of music. Author of a two-volume biography of Bach, he is the world's No. 1 interpreter of the great German's organ music, which he has edited in five volumes...
...century ago quadrilles and cotillions went out of vogue and every café orchestra in Vienna played its music in three-four time because a nervous little man named Johann Strauss had started writing irresistible waltz tunes. He conducted his own compositions while he fiddled bewitchingly at the head of his band. If Johann Strauss fathered the Viennese waltz, his son Johann II (Blue Danube), who was also an expert violinist-conductor, reared it to an historic state of world-wide popularity...
...Manhattan last week popped a Johann Strauss III on his way to Chicago to conduct a 45-piece waltz orchestra at the swank French Casino. Johann Strauss III is 68, a grandson of Johann Strauss I, a nephew of Johann Strauss II whom he greatly resembles. Johann III has the old Strauss way of conducting while fiddling. He inherited his uncle's job as Court Ball conductor for old Emperor Franz Josef. But for most Viennese his chief claim to fame is his name. His compositions (he brought "ein trunksful'') are mediocre and rarely played...
...When Johann Strauss II visited the U. S. in 1872 his wife fairly stripped her pet poodle for hairs to give to admirers who believed they came from the great composer's head. When Johann Strauss III left Vienna, Viennese prophesied that he would return without the loss of a single one of his sleek grey locks...