Word: prussia
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...teacher and pupil never clicked though, and Beethoven was soon free to pursue his own devices. His skills were a key to the world of the privileged, and he picked up many friends among the aristocracy. By the age of 25, he had performed before the king of Prussia...
...Erich Honecker, 72, the East German leader. After decades of unrelenting East bloc propaganda that described "the spirit of militarism and fascism" as a purely Western affliction, Honecker has tried to steer a more nationalist course, chiefly on cultural and historical issues. King Frederick the Great of Prussia and Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor," have been restored to grace in East German schoolbooks. In 1983, East Germany celebrated the 500th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther, who is now described as "an initiator of a great revolutionary movement." The celebration underlined Honecker's modus vivendi with East Germany...
...Becket and Henry II. Encounters between great figures, especially when their world views clash, can create historical watersheds. Such an encounter, writes James R. Gaines, took place on a spring evening in 1747, when an aged Johann Sebastian Bach arrived at the court of Frederick the Great, ruler of Prussia. Frederick, a music lover with as deep a passion for the arts as for waging war, had summoned Bach in order to set him a musical challenge--one that Bach triumphantly met two weeks later when he presented Frederick with one of his greatest works, Musical Offering. But, as Gaines...
Much of the material is dauntingly complex, but Gaines works hard to keep his prose accessible and entertaining--sometimes too hard, as when he writes of Prussia's ruling family, "The Hohenzollerns were a funny bunch," or when, in the midst of explaining Pythagorean numbers and the theory of affections in music, he assures the reader defensively, "This will be over soon." Even the most abstract passages, though, are warmed by his obvious reverence for Bach, whose music he has been playing on the piano since he was a child...
...changed every day!). After Hiroshima, Stalin reflected, "War is barbaric, but using the Abomb is a superbarbarity." This from the man whose Ukrainian famine killed some 10 million, the impresario of the Great Terror, the man who, after Russian soldiers had raped some 2 million women across East Prussia and Germany, asked, "What is so awful about [a soldier's] having...