Word: masterwork
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Senior Writer Paul Gray was an impressionable high school student when he first encountered Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's masterwork. "I was frightened by it," Gray recalls. "I think anyone who reads it carries the experience with him for the rest of his life." For this week's cover story, Gray went back to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the other eight major works and the hundreds of essays in the Orwell canon, to write an appreciation of the late British author...
...these men could know, in 438 B.C., that heavy-shielded Romans would arrive in 86 B.C. and, centuries after, set fire raging in the temple's interior, consuming the gold-and-ivory statue of fair Athena, a masterwork of Phidias now lost to the ages; or that in the 15th century, conquering Turks from across the wine-dark sea would build a domed mosque atop the Parthenon...
...back to Mendelssohn's historic revival of J.S. Bach in 1829. Even so, throughout the last century Bach was known primarily to the most sophisticated musicians, and only a handful of Mozart's myriad works were regularly performed. With composers like Schumann, Brahms and Wagner churning out masterwork after masterwork, there was little need to revive the past. But as the musical repertory gradually evolved into a monument to the 19th century, inquiring performers began to look backward. Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), an English musician and instrumentmaker, rediscovered the nearly forgotten world of the viol, lute and clavichord...
...Yamamoto, whose wondrously simple cascades of fabric combine Kawakubo's seriousness and Miyake's ebullience, may say that "fashion is fashion. In the end I think that fashion should not be an art." But he also expects his clothes to have the social impact of some major masterwork. "If you want to wear these," he says, "then you must change your situation...
...shadowy George Mason, near neighbor of Washington's and brilliant political writer, drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in Williamsburg. A copy was dispatched to Philadelphia, where Jefferson read it just before he sat down to draft the Declaration of Independence. His masterwork had many glints of Mason...