Word: mozartians
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...never able (or, for that matter, inclined) to raise his art to that Mozartian pitch of psychological tension at which Watteau's lovers and courtiers exist. Boucher, unlike Watteau, had no vision of a fragile society whose pleasures, no matter how refined, are menaced by time. Boucher painted pleasure as though it were a perpetual state, coquetry without end, threatened by neither satiety nor boredom. The elements that constitute his afternoon kingdom take on a preternatural luxury as objects; the sky, swarming with clouds of putti and looping swags of fabric, itself acquires the crisp sheen of taffeta...
Walter Gieseking: Mozart's Complete Music for Piano Solo (11 disks, 3 volumes; $32.78; Seraphim). Gieseking's Mozartian style has slid out of fashion somewhat since these recordings were made in the early 1950s; nowadays he is considered just a bit slick and overrefined. But concert pianists, more conscious of quality than fashion, still justly envy the high gloss and exquisite workmanship of Gieseking. Seraphim's low price and lucid reproduction of the mono-only sound make the release a prize for the economy-minded...
...there are some who find Sachertorte unappetizing, the waltz old-fashioned and the Danube dismally dirty. But they belong to a special class of people that Austrians consider teppert, or slightly mad. Even more than Milan, Vienna is the heart and soul of opera land, the city of melodic Mozartian fantasy and thunderous Wagnerian pageantry. Every coffee house has its tables of self-appointed critics; taxi drivers know all the gossipy details of each new backstage feud. Though impoverished Austria badly needed more practical things after World War II, one of the government's first major building activities seemed...
From the ceiling of the Capitol office hangs a magnificent chandelier, circa 1802. Its crystals oscillate freely. They touch and tinkle in a sparkling Mozartian minuet. But hark! Whence comes this counterpoint that shivers the crystals into new and shimmering song? It comes from the man behind the desk-a big-handed, big-boned man with a lined, cornfield face and greying locks that spiral above him like a halo run amok. He speaks, and the words emerge in a soft, sepulchral baritone. They undulate in measured phrases, expire in breathless wisps. He fills his lungs and blows word-rings...
Siepi booms out this amiably imbecilic libretto with Mozartian brio, but his face is as unbending as Alan Ladd's. As the girl in Giovanni's life, brunette beauty Michele Lee owes all her best lines to nature. Though only 19, she seems to have acquired the false vivacity and hackneyed mannerisms of generations of musicomedy ingenues. Swooping about the stage like a benign witch out of a child's storybook, fortyish ex-Ballerina Maria Karnilova, who plays a mate-hungry widow, is remarkably agile and refreshingly comic...