Word: martinet
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...Second Symphony, the Berlin audience was hostile, and the critics fumed about "the cynical impudence of this brutal music maker." The response was characteristic of most Mahler premières. Venerated by a handful of his fellow musicians, Mahler was misunderstood by his public and despised as a martinet by the singers and players who performed under his baton. Now, in the centennial year of his birth, the musical world is taking a fresh look at the last of the great Austrian symphonists. A spate of anniversary performances was inaugurated last week by the New York Philharmonic, playing Mahler...
Agony & Ambition. In Wolfe at Quebec, Historian Hibbert penetrates the fog of hero worship to describe the soldier as he really was-a gangly, slack-chinned, irascible young man in constant pain from a kidney disease. Commissioned at 14, James Wolfe had earned a reputation as a priggish martinet who scorned wining and wenching but relished the meanest chores in his scramble for rank. He had fought well in Flanders against the French, and William Pitt the Elder recommended the stiff-necked young major general to run the siege of Quebec, France's major stronghold in America...
Such proceedings naturally grated against Quincy's rigid ethics. He felt that the only cure would be suitable discipline for the offending undergraduates--but his clamping down produced even greater disorder. Quincy became a martinet, the "Tiberius" of the College. "His policy toward the students, an alternate cuffing and caressing, ended in making him the most unpopular President in Harvard history since Hoar," wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Quincy knew what was right--the Puritan code of upright moral behavior--and attempted to impose this upon the naturally unwilling student body...
...hatred of a young army recruit for his martinet captain in the dusty Pacific town garrison of Portoviejo caused the rioting that put Ecuador under martial law and killed at least 37 people...
...penny revolutionism which went no further than bravado in the face of a Cossack whip and its blow on the back of a padded coat." He studied law briefly at Moscow, then enrolled as a philosophy major in Germany's University of Marburg under a pudgy intellectual martinet, Professor Hermann Cohen, a disciple of Hegel and Kant. In the Gothic-fairy-tale mountain town of Marburg, with its steeply sloping streets and medieval gables, his first serious love came to 18-year-old Boris Pasternak. When the girl turned down his offer of marriage, "[I found] my face...