Word: wolfgang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...complaining loudly that 70% of their labor costs are for social benefits, the steepest percentage in Western Europe. Says Liane Launhardt, an economist for the Frankfurt-based Commerzbank: "There is no doubt that what we have done over the years is escalate the social safety net." Agrees Economist Wolfgang Baumann of the Cologne-based Federation of Industry: "What we need is a shift to supply-side economics, German-style...
MOZART by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, translated by Marion Faber Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 408 pages...
...story with a beginning, middle and end that exerts a satisfying dramatic unity and humanizes its subject. Such notions are wishful thinking and Philistine romanticism, says the author. His own view is that the meanings of Mozart's life and music are completely separate, that Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus in fact hid behind his nonverbal art. The author paraphrases Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni: "Don Juan is not someone who creates himself by thought, but someone who can only reveal himself musically, since the erotic principle by which he lives evades his consciousness or its conscious verbal expression...
...familiar images passed down and touched up for 200 years. "A little man with his wig and sword" is Goethe's description of the child performing for Europe's nobility and dazzling Kapellmeister with feats of improvisation and phonographic memory. There is the prodigy as meal ticket: Wolfgang and his gifted sister Nannerl carted from court to court by Leopold for a few gulden, ducats, florins, pocket watches and snuffboxes. If a theater poster announced an eight-year old Wunderkind even though Mozart was nine, who was Leopold to correct the error? Such was the perishable nature...
Such greasepaint and graven images are verboten in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's temple of the pure genius: "However much we search the reservoir of our imagination for an image whereby Mozart became real to us, we find it, strangely enough, only in the reports of his eccentricities. It is easier to visualize him making faces than walking in the door. I think only someone with no imagination can imagine him." One would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author...