Word: spake
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...early youth, precocious, Munich-born Richard Strauss had written under the influence of Mozart and Brahms. But after about 1885, Strauss's contemporaries called his work "psychopathic music." They railed against the brazen dissonances in his huge, Wagnerian tone poems (Don Quixote, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, etc.), the savage horrors of his operas Salome and Elektra, his general lack of taste in composition. But no one could overlook his genius: his unique gifts as an orchestrator, his penetrating power for illuminating character and for describing anything from the zany antics of Don Quixote to the bestiality...
Strauss: Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Artur Rodzinski conducting; Victor, 9 sides). Though Zarathustra hasn't much to say, Conductor Rodzinski doesn't miss a word. Recording: good...
...Thus spake the 17th Century's Isobel Gowdie, a Scots peasant who confessed her practices as a witch in language as fanciful as one of her great contemporaries, Poet Robert Herrick. Isobel (whom the authorities first hanged, then burned for safe measure) is one of the highlights of Christina Hole's scholarly, sober history of English witchcraft.* Her familiarity with it began when her old nurse destroyed her milk teeth as fast as they fell out, to keep them from evil hands...
...Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world...
...though the pinsters have already begun to turn from the blinking lights to the tossing penny, there'll be no more free games. Thus spake the powers that be, and all's quiet on the Bow Street front. Somebody's tilted...