Word: songful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Thus, during a recent revival at Budapest's Fovarosi Theater of the operetta Countess Maritza (vintage 1924), sang Count Tassilo Endrodi, the impoverished Hungarian nobleman who for the first time in his life has to work for a living. His plaintive song was timely enough to make a lot of Budapest theatergoers squirm. No longer may Hungarian gypsy fiddlers play as they please, nor may Count Endrodi cry into his Tokay with impunity. The Communists have clamped down on nostalgia...
...Flat. In an official directive, Hungary's Communist Council of Arts sternly observed that Hungarian popular music has become "decadent," lacking in the "dynamic rhythm of the new democracy." They express a maudlin desire to return to the "good old days." As an example of the kind of song that was out of tune with Marx ism, the council cited the following ballad...
Budapest's csardas alley was terror-stricken. If a Hungarian could not write about gypsy sweethearts, wishing wells and bachelor flats, what could he write about? Grimly, the boys buckled down to the rhythm of the new democracy. One new Hungarian song presents the revised new view of the good old days. Before the Communists took over, relates the song, a certain "have-not peasant" could not even afford to buy a new shirt or pants, while the landlord's dog grew fat on the peasant's produce. Then, the Communist land reform gave the peasant four...
...entire horse opera singlehanded-from horses to Indian smoke signals to bullets ricocheting off a rock. Rubber-faced Imogene Coca is just as funny modeling a moulting fur coat as she is imitating what Broadway columnists sometimes call a "chantootsie." Bouncy Mary McCarty can tear apart a popular song with fine abandon or imitate a female wine-taster getting drunk on the job. As an extra dividend, man & wife dance team Marge & Gower Champion foot their way featly through the hour...
...Ambrose and His Orchestra in 1937. But she really won her queen's crown during the war with a program for the troops called Sincerely Yours. So many of them heard her telling Private Bill Jones his wife was well, then following up with Bill's favorite song, that standard questions of returning British troops were 1) "What's left of London?" and 2) "Is Vera still alive...