Word: gustav
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...faith with Mann from the outset of his career." And where was he to find those foundations? In the lives of his colleagues and contemporaries, no matter how vulnerable they were; art was everything. Aschenbach, the enfeebled aesthete of Death in Venice (1913), for example, was modeled after Gustav Mahler, who was dying at the time. "Nothing is invented in [the story]," Mann boasted,as if the confession added to his stature as an artist...
...depth of expression rivals Brahms' more famous essays in the form. Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, the finest string-orchestra piece of the century, reaches back for inspiration to the English Renaissance, achieving a spiritual serenity rare in this age of anxiety. Gustav Hoist's The Planets is a superbly effective orchestral showpiece. And two of Benjamin Britten's major operas, Peter Grimes and Death in Venice, belong on any list of the most important modern music dramas...
...Gustav Mahler may be as unfamiliar to one chunk of the population as Blue Oyster Cult is to another, but practically everybody knows what beer weekends-were-made-for and which hamburger hawkers will do-it-all-for-you. In an age of increasingly fractionated audiences for radio and records, and of a dozen or so subdivisions just within rock, jingles selling products may be America's only truly popular, all-embracing music...
...might come closest to a definition of their aspirations," writes Schiff in his catalogue essay on early 19th century artists like Friedrich, Runge and Carl Gustav Carus, "by stating that 'longing' (Sehnen) was the first and almost the last word of German romanticism." These painters were men of exceptional seriousness, their sense of mission verged on the priestly, and they saw art as a powerful means of philosophic speech. As Schiff rightly remarks, one dictum of the writer Friedrich Schlegel appears to summarize their hopes: "Only he can be an artist who has a religion...
...Vienna of his day (1862-1931) was phosphorescent in decay: Schnitzler's contemporaries numbered Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler and Adolf Hitler. Schnitzler chose to puncture that neurasthenic society's pretensions to honor, its pursuit of frivolity and its moral numbness. He knew the absurdity of doubling one's speed when one has lost all sense of direction...