Word: schonberger
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...everybody goes through that kind of awakening. Sammy Reshevsky was a master by age eight, and at the same age Bobby Fischer was astounding people by playing speed chess at the Brooklyn Chess Club. These lucky types are the subject of Harold C. Schonberg's latest book, "Grandmasters of Chess." Schonberg, the top music critic for The New York Times, a patzer and Pulitzer Prize winner, has written "Grandmasters" for a general audience, including failed patzers. It is an immensely entertaining book, lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings. Schonberg traces the history of grandmaster chess, beginning with Philidor...
Writing personal histories, but not evaluating specific games or chess theory, Schonberg displays arresting personalities and tells dozens of famous stories. There is the remark with which Tarrasch began his 1908 match with then world champion Emanuel Lasker: "To you, Dr. Lasker, I have only three words, check and mate." He lost. Or Paul Morphy, the American who was acknowledged as the world's best player during a career of only a year and a half in the 1850s, and who died insane, a hater of the game. And the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca, arguably the greatest player...
...Schonberg dotes on his masters, sympathizing with their troubles, seeing them through difficult times, paternally chiding them for their faults. He cannot resist the music critic's temptation to liken them to composers, setting both grandmasters and musicians in parallel hierarchies. Capablanca--"pure, classic, elegant... yet capable of demonic force in his great moments... the complete technician" is the Mozart of chess, and Alekhine, "a nervous tiger who stalked his prey with involuntary physical twitchings and psychic lust" is Wagner. Fischer, Schonberg asserts, surpasses even Wagner in terms of "monomania...
...touting them all, Schonberg strains his expletives and his description. Steinitz, "born lame, heroic above the torso and a cripple below... had a grudge against the world, and the world returned it." Pillsbury "was genuinely admired as a human being as well as one of the chess geniuses...
Though best known as a film actor (Topkapi, Spartacus), playwright (Romanoff and Juliet) and radio and TV wit ("NATO? Six nations in search of an enemy!"), Peter Ustinov is also an old hand at opera. Over the past decade he has staged one-acters by Puccini, Ravel and Schonberg at Covent Garden, and in 1968 he directed a successful new version of Mozart's The Magic Flute at the Hamburg State Opera. Until that possible day when he sings and acts all the parts in Wagner's Ring cycle, Ustinov's most ambitious operatic venture will...