Word: waspish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fares no better: "The singing of a coloratura is a cross between cackle and a whistle, and performers on the vocal high wire and trapeze are utterly devoid of musical interest to me." O'Connell attacks Lily ("The Pons That Depresses") and husband André Kostelanetz with a waspish malice that a few, backhanded compliments fail to soften. He dislikes their "hand-decorated and chromium-plated" music, inveighs against their commercialism, even gossips that Lily's high heels are designed "to distract the eye from rather generous dimensions in the horizontal planes...
Senator Vandenberg has wholeheartedly supported the bill to aid Greece and Turkey-aid which was pointed up this week by the arrival of the U.S. aircraft carrier Leyte off Istanbul. He led the fight for the bill's passage in the Senate. There he successfully warded off the waspish Left and the economy-minded Right. Thus, if the Truman Doctrine applies only to Greek-Turkish aid, Vandenberg supports it. But he does not think that the bipartisan policy extends to the Truman Doctrine. He does not consider it a doctrine at all, but merely a "selective pattern...
James McNeill Whistler's stock was going up. Bought from a Manhattan dealer by the Detroit Institute of Arts was the waspish Victorian dandy's famed Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket-the splattery nightscape that moved John Ruskin to a crack about "a coxcomb flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." (Bad Boy Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, won a farthing's damages.) Asking price for Nocturne that year (1875) was $1,000. Price reportedly paid by Detroit...
...written it as a critique of modern manners and morals. Most reviewers agreed that it was an honest and intelligent work; many a reviewer and reader found it labored, obscure, pedantic and depressing. By all the form charts it should have been forgotten except perhaps in the more waspish literary circles of Manhattan...
...rehearsed Ariadne from a score annotated for her by Strauss 15 years ago. But Manhattan critics, busy passing out bravos all around for the City Opera's Ariadne, were generally cool to Ella. Said the New York Herald Tribune's waspish Virgil Thomson: "She mostly stood around looking like the Statue of Liberty and sang flat." The critics' enthusiasm went to the opera itself, and to the singing of two younger sopranos: 30-year-old Polyna Stoska, who sang the tricky role of the boy composer, and tiny Virginia Mac-Watters, 26, protegee of Lotte Lehmann...