Word: anton
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POOR, isolated, shy, genial, tubercular, counting winters and declining tapers, ruminating over the households revolving in his mind, diffidently putting them to paper, Anton Chekhov wrote four of the most wonderful comedies in world literature. Few people find Chekhov comical. Most read about these lugubrious, slow, heavy houses full of people protesting their happiness, lamenting their misery, incapable of action, occasionally incanting a vision of the future. We search for themes, ideas, directions, and find none unambiguously free from irony. We see only dolorous mansions crackling with nervous expectation, yearning for changes, immobilized by forces vaguely understood, secure only...
Beethoven was not one to throw things out. After his death in 1827, about 400 Conversation Notebooks were found. His Boswell-the devoted but officious Anton Schindler-collected them all, then destroyed about 260 as unimportant, uninteresting or, in the case of two books of conversations with a violinist whom Schindler despised, because "they contained the grossest and most boundless criticism of the Kaiser and Crown Prince. . . ." Schindler sold 137 books to the Staatsbibliothek (State Library) in what is now East Berlin, and there they lay for more than a century. A previous attempt to publish the notebooks...
Ophuls maintains a balance between scheme and characters by acknowledging and mocking the scheme. The meneur d? jen (Anton Walbrook), who opens the film by addressing the audience, keeps returning to change seenes between the ten episodes which compose the film. His appearances as functionaries-headwaiters, coachmen-are at once pleasantly obvious and sparked by unexpected twists which it would be criminal to reveal. Ophuls similarly keeps a sustained irony from overweighting the episodes, by employing a formal inventiveness remarkably responsive to the nuances of each situation. The subtle differences of class, age, and character of each person affords Ophuls...
...Ronde is hardly so dark. In large part it simply invites its audience to watch a divertissement. But Anton Walbrook's introduction mentions our "curiosity...people want to see all sides of life." This "curiosity" makes us follow the affairs of Ophuls' characters and sets up the final reversal when the plot comes full circle. Emotions that began the film trivial and simple, and became deeper and more important to the characters, are lost in the proliferation of incidents and characters. Our detachment imperceptibly increases as his characters grow older and more sophisticated, as their relations become games between people...
...Anton Bruckner's Overture in G minor proved to be a beautiful small piece. Bruckner belongs to that unhappy group of composers including Liszt. Schmidt, Reger, Vaughan Williams, and even Schoenberg, whose music is fashionably vilified without benefit of humane audition. The tedious and lamentable caricature of Bruckner most often encountered is of an amateurish, even childishly naive, rural organist who afflicted the world with eleven appallingly identical symphonies which are massive, repetitious, incoherent and only convulsively appealing. If he is given any credit at all, which rarely happens since people prefer summary condemnation to critical acceptance of monumental genius...