Word: musician
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Cold Water. Though his eminence is still somewhat grudgingly conceded in Central Europe, for Central Europeans have a firm faith that only a Central European can write a good symphony, little Finland's great man Sibelius is regarded by many a musician as the lineal successor of Beethoven and Brahms. His present fame has arrived slowly and late. His music, individual, serious, austere and sometimes forbidding, contains no trace of modernistic tricks or formulas. As he once remarked to his publisher (in Swedish) "Här i utlandet fabricemr ni cocktails i olika külorer, och nu kommer...
Whatever the rating he gives him, there can be no doubt that his favorite musician is Jean Sibelius. He owns three radios and never misses a broadcast of his own compositions, tuning in inaccurately and listening intently to the resultant howling mixture of music and static. "You must be a good, very good musician to listen to radio," he says, "to get details...
...entirely confident of his position as a great musician, he is very appreciative of appreciation, collects, reads and rereads every small item that is written about him in the most provincial newspapers. On the subject of his interpreters he is diplomatic, has indiscriminately praised Conductors Koussevitzky, Beecham, Werner Janssen and his countryman Robert Kajanus. He has a comforting motto: "Better have it played badly or wrong than...
...nine, but he started to compose almost immediately. At 15 he took up the violin, with the local military bandmaster as instructor. In his mature years he confessed to an early ambition to become a great violinist. The respectable Sibelius family, however, considered a career as a musician too precarious. They suggested law, and for a time the young composer dutifully pegged away at the University of Helsingfors. But he spent all his spare time composing and studying harmony with Martin Wegelius at the Music Institute...
...youngest of the corrosive trio is impish and irreverent to perfection; Jane Sterling makes an excellent middle sister, a beautiful, exuberant animal; and Helen Trenholme does more than her share as the eldest, who, though by no means languorous, is calm enough to fall in love with a bashful musician, and charming enough to carry him off. Aubrey Mather is equally flawless as the corpulent colleague of the hero, who irritates and is irritated by his fellow pedagogue in numerous amiable ways. Phoebe Foster is quite satisfactory as the quietly domineering aunt, relieved of her nieces in time to scare...