Word: sardonicism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Busoni, an Italian who spent much of his life in Berlin and was more famous as a pianist and pedagogue (and transcriber of Bach) than as a composer, wrote the libretto for Harlequin on a visit to the U.S. in 1915. He hung his sardonic and sometimes savage satire on...
The music, as terse in style as the libretto, is sardonic too. Sample: the young guitar-playing tenor of the piece (David Lloyd) manages to parody the Walthers and Rodolfos of romantic German and Italian opera without sounding exactly like either.
Pagliacci, a thin, sardonic man, was tickled by the uproar but explained that he meant no harm; his ecclesiastical arson was based on purely artistic principles. "It all came from my desire to paint smoke in transparency against architecture. The idea of flames came later. Where there is smoke there...
"The very rich," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in one of his short stories, "are different from you and me." "Yes," was the sardonic comment of Ernest Hemingway, "they have more money."
Wystan Hugh Auden is a monstrous clever fellow. As an undergraduate at Oxford (1925-28) he was the most precocious of a literary set that included such precocities as Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Cecil Day Lewis. These lads were esthetes-with-a-difference: instead of snubbing the grown...