Word: temperments
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...while Levine has learned his lessons well, he is aware of human limitations, as Callas, with her temperamental voice, always was and as Toscanini, with his fiery temper, usually was not. Levine's musical ethos, demanding though it is, is still far from that of old-fashioned tyrants like his mentor, George Szell, or Fritz Reiner. "Perfectionist is one of the stupidest words in the English language," says Levine. "Take any performance. I promise you that there will be a pizzicato chord that's not together; somewhere or other a horn will crack. If there are a number...
...self-effacing man, ever gracious in manner, polite in speech, but implacably stubborn. As Senator after Senator fired questions at him, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger coolly presented the Administration's case for the MX missile before the Armed Services Committee last week. Never once did Weinberger lose his temper or raise his voice. And no matter how heated the interrogation, Weinberger did not budge a millimeter from his position. "Once his mind is made up, he is impossible to bend," says a close associate at the Pentagon. "He is a gentle man with a rod of iron...
...Richard's high school ROTC instructor, Major Robert Vegvary: "Something monstrous and horrible must have happened at home." Indeed, to hear local residents tell it, something had. Though a devoted father, the elder Jahnke was described by those who knew him as an ultrastrict disciplinarian with an explosive temper that often boiled over into physical violence. He doled out severe beatings to his children for the most minor infractions; his Puerto Rican-born wife Maria stood by helplessly during her husband's fist-wielding tirades and sometimes suffered violence herself. Said a friend of the family...
...first hit movie (Come and Get It, 1936) to join the Group Theater in New York City as the star of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy. Life struck back at Frances with gaudy vengefulness. Odets and his group dumped her. She was cast in forgettable B pictures. Her caustic temper cost her: Farmer's rap sheet was soon as long as her filmography. After one pathetic performance before a California judge, she was sent to the first of an increasingly Dickensian series of asylums, undergoing shock treatment, gang rape and perhaps even a lobotomy...
...things too long mute: love of the land (in this case, Southern Appalachia), the inviolability of the family, the rigorous ethic of hard work and the rebuke and solace of an omnipresent God. To think of that as a didactic, neo-conservative agenda is to miss the tone and temper of the work. Foxfire has already been called a "hillbilly Our Town," which is close to the mark. And even those with less than a lifetime's acquaintance with the work of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy must know that this pair could strike songs from stones...