Word: wolff
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...handful of adventurers who penetrated the bone-littered wastes of Central Asia during the past 125 years. Many of them stayed there, with their heads cleaved from their bodies by the bloodthirsty rulers of Bokhara, Merv, Kokand and Khiva. The most fascinating of these adventurers was one Joseph Wolff, a disputatious Jew turned Anglican missionary, who set out in 1843 to rescue two British officers held captive in Bokhara...
Poker at Seven. The son of a German rabbi, Wolff early developed a crank interest in religion and, at seven, was so critical of the tenets of the Jewish faith that his exasperated aunt threw a poker at him. He examined Lutheranism and found it wanting, tried Roman Catholicism but was expelled from a Redemptorist monastery, and finally entered the ministry of the Church of England...
...contentious missionary, he got into trouble throughout the Middle East. Kurdish tribesmen loaded him with chains and bastinadoed him; in Khorasan he was flogged, in Afghanistan nearly burned alive. Wolff was also shipwrecked, poisoned, stung half to death by wasps, and three times stripped naked in the desert and left...
...Bokhara to liberate the British officers, Missionary Wolff stopped off in Teheran to shout down the Shah of Persia, paused at Merv for a three-cornered theological debate with a dervish and a Talmudic scholar. Arriving in Bokhara with its Tower of Death, verminous dungeons and treacherous Emir, Wolff grandly ordered that the British prisoners be handed over to him. "How extraordinary," exclaimed the Emir. "I have 200,000 Persian slaves here-nobody cares for them; and on account of two Englishmen, a person comes from England and single-handedly demands their release." Wolff was jolted to discover that...
...usual, Webern made his successors seem rather tentative and shapeless (the exception was Mr. Rzewski's vastly self-assured piece), but he did not detract from their clear achievements, largely in the matters of color and dynamic subtlety. Whether or not the structural question has been answered is problematical. Wolff and others say that sense of direction should not necessarily be looked for in this music, that many works ought to be regarded as static. If this is so, then aduiences will have to learn a completely new way of listening. It is not altogether improbable; since 1900 composers have...