Word: motionless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gieseking took his seat at the piano. With his thick shoulders hunched motionless over the keyboard and his heavy head bent reflectively, he had an air of a man determined to prove his case quickly. When he began to play a Mozart sonata, its contours were practically flawless, but the playing was so rigidly controlled that the effect was almost oppressive. Beethoven's Sonata Op. 110 was more relaxed, but it was only when he came to the impressionist music of Debussy and Ravel-billowing up tinted clouds of tone and lacing them with bright spiderwebs of melody-that...
Muffled Tread. In the freezing cold of Monday morning, March 9, the pageant of death was played out to its end. A silent 35,000 massed in the flower-banked vastness of Red Square. Thousands held black-bordered portraits of the dead man. A 750-piece band stood motionless. Tall, grey-coated guardsmen paced silently before the great red and black stone mausoleum Stalin had built for Lenin, and now is to share with him until the government builds a promised new Pantheon for Stalin, Lenin and all the lesser gods of Communism...
...assumed that all three boys had been buried, presumed the party would not be missed for 36 hours. He prayed. Melting snow ran into one of his ears-drop by drop-like a Chinese torture. The bad air made him sick and he vomited. But he kept himself motionless, hour after hour, as darkness fell-and as a rescue party, guided by his friend Eddie Almquist-battled upward through a blinding blizzard...
...which had been enacted a thousand times before in a thousand other cheap rooms. There was the battered stove with its jets silently exhaling death. There were the whisky bottle and the two unwashed glasses. There was the rumpled bed. There were two figures, a man and a woman-motionless, voiceless, impersonal as dummies...
...never been able to get out of bed unaided. Polio, which is yearly taking a higher toll of adults, had spared the Kidder children but struck the father. As he puts it: "From active good health I was transformed in two short days into a motionless hulk...