Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Riviera last year. Pablo Picasso had never seemed more relaxed, playing with his children, feeding his parrots and his owl, greeting the visitors who dropped in every day. Then one day Picasso disappeared into his big second-floor studio, and became a changed man. "There was a tragic preoccupation on his face," says Novelist Hélène Parmelin. Every day after lunch he would go up to his studio "like someone going up to the scaffold." Picasso was attempting to repaint in his own manner and to do an analysis on canvas of the picture he considers...
...comic type till suddenly-out of Winesburg, Ohio more than Worcester, Mass.-he kills himself. Earlier, Behrman nowhere sounds the few right notes that might anticipate such dark final chords; from the beginning, in fact, Willie is all flat surface. The flatness is really general; that Willie is joltingly tragic matters less than that all the young people seem hand-me-downs...
...baritones than Fischer-Dieskau. But there are no singers about nowadays who use their voices with more intelligence, accuracy or theatrical effect. Fischer-Dieskau never uses his texts as excuses for mere vocal gymnastics. In the art songs of Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, he sings his way into moods alternately tragic, boisterous and nostalgic with subtle modulations of his dry, husky voice. And when at climactic moments he throws his baritone out in a high, ringing fortissimo, the effect is as spine-tingling as a trumpet blast...
...Soviet note, with a spurious mildness and plausibility, set out to court every color of German or European political opinion. ''Millions of Englishmen cannot forget the tragic lot of Coventry," or the Czechs, Lidice. Could the West be sure a rearmed West Germany "will not attack its present partners again?" Khrushchev's underlying theme was that he rejects German reunification. The Communists are there to stay in East Germany (see below), and the only kind of reunification that can be hoped for is a confederation...
...Oedipus-uncomplex Hamlet, so drawn to his mother that he hated his father, so identified with the lover's role that to kill his stepfather would be to kill himself. Truth tumbles out in a climactic modern Closet Scene, but consequences take a therapeutic rather than tragic turn...