Word: johanns
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...life is a story with a beginning, middle and end that exerts a satisfying dramatic unity and humanizes its subject. Such notions are wishful thinking and Philistine romanticism, says the author. His own view is that the meanings of Mozart's life and music are completely separate, that Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus in fact hid behind his nonverbal art. The author paraphrases Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni: "Don Juan is not someone who creates himself by thought, but someone who can only reveal himself musically, since the erotic principle by which he lives evades his consciousness or its conscious verbal...
...school toughs-moral crustaceans dressed in swastika T shirts and the very latest leather-are led by no ordinary psychopath. Stegman (Timothy Van Patten) is also a musical prodigy: as he directs a gang rape of the hero's wife he whistles the first bars from Johann Strauss's giddy Voices of Spring waltz. All this is enough to make even the mildest of men, Music Teacher Andy Norris (Perry King), reeeally mad, mad enough to set one of the gang members aflame, smash a second with a tire iron and drive a buzz saw through the spine...
...fetchingly melodic. The masterly and inventive directorial hand of Tommy Tune is everywhere in evidence, but he has permitted the scent of high camp and low vulgarity to permeate far too much of the show. In one obnoxious sequence, a plump, leering bawd inducts the boy Guido (Cameron Johann) and three of his classmates into the rites of sex to the beat of tambourines and the priapic chant Be Italian, Intermittently spotlighted during the show is a quartet of women dubbed "The Germans," who would have been called "The Beef Trust" in vaudeville, a gross physical mockery...
...character who adds a distinctly Germanic touch to the story is the engineer Johann, whose red-rimmed eyes, hollow-cheeked beared and skewed teeth suggest a gnome straight out of Grimm's ghastly tales. Nicknamed "The Phantom," he crouches like a magicker among his intricate pumping machinery and shivers with foreboding before each explosion of an underwater bomb. But he is not the only hint of a tradition of fantasy. At one point we awake with the correspondent not knowing whether the terrifying crises of the past hours were real or only a dream. We share an unsettling feeling about...
...they happen to be fashionable at the moment." In 1975 he called the previous decade "a period of ecclesiastical decadence in which the people who had started it later on became incapable of stopping the avalanche." After Ratzinger was appointed Archbishop of Munich in 1977, he barred Liberation Theologian Johann Baptist Metz from a professorship and engineered the Vatican crackdown on his former colleague Küng. Ratzinger's shift prompted charges of opportunism; students broke up one of his campus appearances last year with booing and jeering chants...