Word: heroic
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High jinks and high Cs reigned supreme throughout the operatic career of the Danish-born heldentenor (heroic tenor). For 24 seasons (1926-50) at the Met, it was impossible to imagine Wagner without "the Great Dane." He sang in more than 1,000 Wagnerian performances-more than three times the total of any other singer-with no hint of diminution of the robust tenor that could swoop from a splendorous high to a deep, resonant...
Pride. Life offstage was no less strenuous. Melchior consumed mammoth meals, washed down by heroic quantities of aquavit and Danish beer. He traveled widely and was an enthusiastic big-game hunter. (He liked to wear the skin of a deer he had bagged as his costume in Siegfried.) He took great joy in entertaining friends with his wife "Kleinchen" during festive holidays like Christmas, when he unabashedly decked himself out as a jolly Santa Claus...
...think that there had been anything heroic about his long incarceration in a mazelike prison outside Peking. "I thought the 20 years were to a large extent wasted," he said at a press conference in New Britain, Conn. "I don't see that it benefited anybody. Not Uncle Sam or anybody else. I wouldn't recommend it for character building." He admitted that, under pressure, he had told his captors everything he knew. But it was "ancient history" without much importance. He is not planning to write a book unless a publisher is interested in "500 empty pages...
...only a few people are interested in this practice, she says, "because most people don't care enough about it to be reinforced by it." A major criticism of Skinner's theory of human behavior is that it represents, in the words of Arthur Koestler, "question-begging on a heroic scale," and here is a perfect example. If people have to be interested in something before they can be reinforced by it, then reinforcement obviously presumes the very thing it is supposed to create: an inclination to perform the action in question...
Fiat engineers found their Soviet workers something less than heroic. The buses that brought workers from their homes about seven miles away somehow took 1½hours to make the trip, so that few workers were ever on the job before 10 a.m. To avoid missing the bus home, they sometimes quit a half-hour early. One Italian mechanic reported finding a machine that had been leaking 40 Ibs. of oil a day for two weeks; its Soviet operators had neglected to request repairs. "Our conception of maintenance is entirely unknown to them," the Italian said...