Word: wunderkinder
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Like the reigning romantic heroes of mid-19th century musical Europe, Chopin and Liszt, New Orleans-born Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69) had sex appeal aplenty. As a Wunderkind pianist-composer in the Paris salons, as a lion on tour in the U.S., the West Indies and Latin America, he dazzled the ladies with his pink-lemonade piano pieces and thrilled them with his frail, aristocratic good looks and his saturnine, bedroomy eyelids. One panting female, so the story goes, even swooped down upon him at the end of a recital, picked him up in her arms and made...
...second Wunderkind arrived in 1929. Robert Maynard Hutchins came to the university at the age of 30, also from Yale where he had been dean of the law school. Like Harper, he could not resist the chance to put his ideas into practice. During his 22 years at Chicago, Hutchins developed his philosophy of education into the "Chicago plan" which focused on the undergraduate...
...Conductor Walter Hendl, a judge in the piano competition, agreed that Sokolov was a true Wunderkind, but that Dichter had a more promising future as a soloist. Still, when the Russians broached the idea of dividing the first prize between Sokolov and Dichter, Hendl vetoed it on the grounds that dividing leading prizes weakened their impact. The jury voted, Sokolov won, and the crowd promptly went wild-for Dichter. Five hundred Russians who had stayed until 2 a.m. to hear the results, kept chanting "Bravo Dichter! Bravo Dichter!", and several women wept and pressed flowers into his outstretched hands...
Romping around on this modern surface at the Garden was an equally advanced set of tennis players. There was California's rangy Pancho Gonzales, trying for a comeback at the ripe age of 37, and the current Wunderkind of the pro circuit, Australia's Rod ("Rocket") Laver, 27, biggest money winner ($65,495) in 1965. Finally, there was slight (5 ft. 7 in.), polite Ken Rosewall, also an Australian and evidently a has-been at 31, since Laver had pushed him off the top of the heap last year. In the quarterfinals, Gonzales gave Rosewall something to think...
...eight, he was playing in Berlin under the sharp eye of Josef Joachim, who soon brought the Wunderkind to Barth. At eleven, he played Mozart's Concerto in A Major with the Berlin Symphony. In 1906, thanks to the influence of a U.S. music critic who had heard him play at Paderewski's Swiss villa, the young pianist was signed for a tour of the U.S. It was a dud. At his debut in Carnegie Hall, the critics dismissed Rubinstein for being, as one put it, "half-baked?not a prodigy, not an adult." Those were the days when...