Word: waltz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are, of course, some Viennese who dislike opera-just as there are some who find Sachertorte unappetizing, the waltz old-fashioned and the Danube dismally dirty. But they belong to a special class of people that Austrians consider teppert, or slightly mad. Even more than Milan, Vienna is the heart and soul of opera land, the city of melodic Mozartian fantasy and thunderous Wagnerian pageantry. Every coffee house has its tables of self-appointed critics; taxi drivers know all the gossipy details of each new backstage feud. Though impoverished Austria badly needed more practical things after World...
...Experience of Things. Cage patterned six of the harpsichord solos after a 200-year-old romp known as Dice Music. Attributed to Mozart, who liked a joke as much as anyone else, Dice Music consists of a waltz theme and a set of variations that are determined in a Cage-like manner, by rolling dice. In Hpschd, Cage embroidered the variations with snippets from works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni-even Cage. Each player had seven 20-minute chunks of music to choose from. Once having played, he was free to chat for a while with the listeners...
...Both men shook hands and smiled as if they could not remember that they had traded some of the bitterest personal exchanges in modern American politics.* When Truman, now 84, demurred at a suggestion that he try the old Steinwav, Nixon sat down and affably pounded out the Missouri Waltz in the key of G. Later, in Southern California, Nixon considered sites for his own library, spending the weekend in a picturesque oceanfront house at San Clemente, 50 miles south of Los Angeles, that he is thinking of buying for a summer White House...
...starter, Waltz blows the top off a mountain; then he goes on to sink an is land and dig a moon crater or two. In Act II, a sequence of absurdist hilarity, the nation's council of generals begins bidding at 2,000 crowns and goes to 1,000,000 in a vain effort to buy Waltz's infernal machine. During the negotiations, these senile clowns play with toy automobiles and sail paper airplanes at one another and into the audience...
With his monstrous inventions, Nabokov seems to say, man has expelled himself from the Eden of Nature. Waltz rules the world but loses the girl who had captured his love when she told him who had lived on the mountain top he had blown up - ";an old enchanter and a snow-white gazelle." At play's end, the humiliatingly real interview with the Minister of War takes place and Waltz is hauled off to the madhouse...