Word: ruining
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...moment of wrath, Hamburg State Opera Impresario Rolf Liebermann once exclaimed: "It's the directors who ruin everything. It's never the composer, conductor or singers. The directors are just so many dilettanti who don't know their job. Their only concern is their own vanity...
Change as Ruin. In Torregreca, no undue sentimentality was shown on either side. By 1959, beneath her Poughkeepsie patina, Miss Cornelisen had become a five-year veteran of Southern Italy, working for a British charity called the Save the Children Fund, bent on setting up nursery centers in recalcitrant mountain villages. Torregreca was the intended scene of her greatest triumph: a new master center where teachers could be developed and experiments initiated. Thus trained and dedicated, she soon found that the town's aura of Romantic gilt was misleading...
...FIGHT . . . DUCE, DUCE, DUCE. Yet modern history, Mussolini included, had passed Torregreca by. The imposing ducal palace was actually chopped up into "a squalid maze of schoolrooms and government offices, each with a stovepipe sticking drunkenly out of a window." Change was the shallowest of facades, mostly visible as ruin. A "cardboard democracy" allowed Communists and Christian Democrats to succeed one another monotonously in the mayor's office. But the real power still rested with the bishop in his diocesan quarters-marble floors, red plush draperies, gold-framed loveseats-and with those few petty officials, from policeman...
Then there was Berlin, where East Germany's Walter Ulbricht was once again applying the squeeze. Though it was unlikely that the Russians would ruin their chance for a new Soviet-American understanding by allowing Berlin to reach crisis proportions during Nixon's visit, the very fact that the divided city was again an issue was a sobering reminder that Russia and the U.S. still have to remove major roadblocks to any overall understanding. Similarly, the threatened maneuvers of Russian troops in East Germany and Ulbricht's interference with traffic to and from Berlin recalled the Communist might and will...
...arrangement of America the Beautiful for forty oil drums, to the Inaugural performance of All We Like Sheep by that otiose organ of musical dyspepsia, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Television emerges briefly from its ashcan to air a splendid production of Midsummer Night's Dream and then proceeds to ruin the gesture by taking out a full-page newspaper advertisement the next day celebrating its wondrous beneficence. The Trustees of our orchestras are unconquerably reactionary, hopelessly clinging to the Romantic core of the repertoire. The ungainly orchestral apparat of a tableau vivant of funereal men playing the ten thousandth repetition...