Word: rococo
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Finally, Ursula Oppens came and played Beethoven. She played him as he should be played, with the overall lightness that this last of the rococo concerti deserves (for although numbered the First, this is actually the second of Beethoven's piano concerti, and in the last three he had completely transcended the form as Mozart had left it), yet did not slight the brooding moments foretelling what dark depths would be revealed in the composer's later music. In other words, she achieved the difficult synthesis of rococo and romantic that is Beethoven's music...
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo wanted people to look up to his art. He painted his most famous work on ceilings. Venetian by birth and rococo by temperament, the 18th century master loved to loft dangling goddesses, altitudinous angels and rafters of neck-craning cherubs. His specialty, naturally, was clouds, and his best work adorns sundry ceilings from Madrid's royal palace to Wurzburg's bishop's Residenz. Last week Tiepolo unexpectedly raised the roofs in London...
...18th century, the Town and Country Mice feast at a rococo table and wet their whiskers in champagne. Calder and Frasconi, with a narrative assist from Marianne Moore, have put the fables in soberer dress for today...
Aristocrats as Shepherds. From the porcelain, etchings, and gold-and silverwork at the Atheneum, it is evident that rococo was a way of life, abandoned, whimsical, undemanding. Artisanship lavished on a table centerpiece produced a jungle of gilt. The etchings tell of nature tamed in a palace park, where artificial ruins and Chinese pagodas were built to provide fantasy...
...Rococo was a royal style, yet one born of relief at the passing away of the splendor and pomp of Versailles and Louis XIV. Aristocrats yearned to lay aside their powdered wigs and play peasant. Marie-Antoinette's fake hamlet in the Trianon park was a doll's house for kings in fustian and queens in dirndls. Watteau and Boucher drew members of the nobility in shepherds' clothing. But aristocracy saw poverty as happy simplicity, not as a wretched problem. Came the French Revolution of 1789, and the wistful sound in the sea shell was no longer...