This song by the Commodores is special to me. It was "our song" when I was romancing my wife.
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Letty
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Wed 7 May, 2008 04:01 am
Good morning, WA2K radio audience.
Ah, edgar. I recall that song from your "twisted lyrics" thread. What a beautiful way to say, "I love you" to your lovely wife, Texas.
Well, I don't exactly care for bebop, but this one Bud played solo on his bass, so I thought I would let everyone listen to one helluva great woman do it, proving that there are those ladies who still can rival the guys when it comes to jazz.
I don't dig the bebop that much. I generally prefer lyrics over all else (but not always).
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Letty
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Wed 7 May, 2008 05:27 am
edgar, I had forgotten what a sad life Connie Francis had. Frankly, Texas, I never cared for her style, but then I didn't listen. Now I do, and it makes a difference.
Robert Browning
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born May 7, 1812
Camberwell, London England
Died December 12, 1889
Venice, Italy
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.
Youth
Browning was born in Camberwell,[1] a suburb of London, England, on May 7, 1812, the first son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His father was a man of both fine intellect and character, who worked as a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England. Robert's father amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them obscure and arcane. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His mother, with whom he was ardently bonded, was a devout Nonconformist. He had a younger sister, also gifted, who became the companion in her brother's later years. As a family unit they lived simply, and his father encouraged his interest in literature and the Arts.
In childhood, he was distinguished by a love of poetry and natural history. By twelve, he had written a book of poetry which he later destroyed when no publisher could be found. After attending several private schools he began to be educated by a tutor, having demonstrated a strong dislike for institutionalized education.
Browning was a fast learner and by the age of fourteen was fluent in French, Greek, Italian and Latin as well as his native English. He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian, both of which he later shed. At age sixteen, he attended University College, London, but left after his first year. His mother's staunch evangelical faith circumscribed the pursuit of his reading at either Oxford or Cambridge, then both only available to members of the Church of England. He had substantial musical ability and he composed arrangements of various songs.
Middle life
In 1845, Browning met Elizabeth Barrett, who lived in her father's house in Wimpole Street. Gradually a significant romance developed between them, leading to their secret marriage in 1846. (The marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's tyrannical father disapproved of marriage for any of his children.) From the time of their marriage, the Brownings lived in Italy, first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence which they called Casa Guidi (now a museum to their memory). Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849. In these years Browning was fascinated by and learned hugely from the art and atmosphere of Italy. He would, in later life, say that 'Italy was my university'. The Brownings also bought a home in Asolo, in the Veneto outside Venice, and in a cruel irony the poet Browning died on the day that the Town Council approved the purchase.[2]
Browning's poetry was known to the cognoscenti from fairly early on in his life, but he remained relatively obscure as a poet till his middle age. (In the middle of the century, Tennyson was much better known.) In Florence he worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known; in 1855, however, when these were published, they made little impact. It was only after his wife's death, in 1861, when he returned to England and became part of the London literary scene, that his reputation started to take off. In 1868, after five years work, he completed and published the long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book, and finally achieved really significant recognition. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem is composed of twelve books, essentially comprising ten lengthy dramatic poems narrated by the various characters in the story showing their individual take on events as they transpire, bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself. Extraordinarily long even by Browning's own standards (over twenty thousand lines), The Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and has been hailed as a tour de force of dramatic poetry. Published separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the poem was a huge success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought and deserved for nearly forty years of work.
Late life
In the remaining years of his life he traveled extensively and frequented London. Few of his later poems gained the popularity of The Ring and the Book, and they are largely unread today. However, Browning's later work has been undergoing a major critical re-evaluation in recent years, and much of it remains of interest for its poetic quality and psychological insight. After a series of long poems published in the early 1870s, of which Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country were the best-received, Browning again turned to shorter poems. The volume Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper included a spiteful attack against Browning's critics, especially the later Poet Laureate Alfred Austin.
According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several occasions.
The Browning Society was formed for the appreciation of his works in 1881.
In 1887, Browning produced the major work of his later years, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance In Their Day. It finally presented the poet speaking in his own voice, engaging in a series of dialogues with long-forgotten figures of literary, artistic, and philosophic history. Once more, the Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned to the short, concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889).
He died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December 1889, the same day Asolando was published, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.
Browning's poetic style
Browning's fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker's character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the process of rationalizing past actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem. Rather than thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defense which the reader, as "juror," is challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of the most debased, extreme and even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the challenge of building a sympathetic case for a character who doesn't deserve one and to cause the reader to squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a homicidal psychopath. One of his more sensational monologues (though not a dramatic monologue, by definition) is "Porphyria's Lover." The opening lines provide a sinister setting for the macabre events that follow. It is plain that the speaker is insane, as he strangles his lover with her own hair to try and preserve for ever the moment of perfect love she has shown him.
Yet it is by carefully reading the far more sophisticated and cultivated rhetoric of the aristocratic and civilized Duke of "My Last Duchess," perhaps the most frequently cited example of the poet's dramatic monologue form, that the attentive reader discovers the most horrific example of a mind totally mad despite its eloquence in expressing itself. The duchess, we learn, was murdered not because of infidelity, not because of a lack of gratitude for her position, and not, finally, because of the simple pleasures she took in common everyday occurrences. She's reduced to an objet d'art in the Duke's collection of paintings and statues because the Duke equates his instructing her to behave like a duchess with "stooping," an action of which his megalomaniacal pride is incapable. In other monologues, such as "Fra Lippo Lippi," Browning takes an ostensibly unsavory or immoral character and challenges us to discover the goodness, or life-affirming qualities, that often put the speaker's contemporaneous judges to shame. In The Ring and the Book Browning writes an epic-length poem in which he justifies the ways of God to humanity through twelve extended blank verse monologues spoken by the principals in a trial about a murder. These monologues greatly influenced many later poets, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the latter singling out in his Cantos Browning's convoluted psychological poem about a frustrated 13-century troubadour, Sordello, as the poem he must work to distance himself from.
Ironically, Browning's style, which seemed modern and experimental to Victorian readers, owes much to his love of the seventeenth century poems of John Donne with their abrupt openings, colloquial phrasing and irregular rhythms. But he remains too much the prophet-poet and descendant of Percy Shelley to settle for the conceits, puns, and verbal play of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His is a modern sensibility, all too aware of the arguments against the vulnerable position of one of his simple characters, who recites: "God's in His Heaven; All's right with the world." Browning endorses such a position because he sees an immanent deity that, far from remaining in a transcendent heaven, is indivisible from temporal process, assuring that in the fullness of theological time there is ample cause for celebrating life. Browning's is assuredly at once the most incarnate and dynamic of deities, in Christianity and perhaps in any of the world's great religions.
History of sound recording
Browning was the first person to ever have his voice heard after his death. On a recording[1] made by Thomas Edison in 1889, Browning reads "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" (including apologizing when he forgets the words). It was first played in Venice in 1890.[citation needed]
Cultural references
The last two lines of the famous "Song" from Pippa Passes ?- "God's in his heaven, All's right with the world!" ?- are parodied in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with the hypnopaedic slogan: - "Ford's in his flivver, all's right with the world!" Browning's lines are also used in the Japanese animations Neon Genesis Evangelion, RahXephon, Black Lagoon, and Darker than Black. In another Japanese animation, R.O.D. the T.V., the final line is a take off stating "The Paper's in her heaven, All's right in the world."
John Lennon's song "Grow Old with Me", which was inspired by Browning's's poem Rabbi ben Ezra, appears on Lennon's album Milk and Honey.
Stephen King's Dark Tower series was inspired by Browning's poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
In the Get Carter remake, at the opening of the film, the quote "That's all we can expect of man, this side of the grave; his good is ... knowing he is bad" is shown on the screen.
The Songs From A Dazzling Drift album by folk musician Yo Zushi is named after a line from Browning's poem, Women and Roses.
Anthony Powell used Browning's work for the titles of two of his novels: What's Become of Waring (1939) inspired by Waring from Dramatic Romances and Lyrics and The Soldier's Art, part of the A Dance to the Music of Time sequence, named for a line from Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
Issac Asimov's first novel, Pebble In The Sky used a slightly altered form of Rabbi Ben Ezra as a theme for the book, recited and often considered by the main character.
In Season 4, Episode 5 of the X-Files: "The Field Where I Died"(1996), Mulder reads lines from "Paracelsus" at the beginning and end of the episode.
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bobsmythhawk
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:03 am
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (Russian: Пётр Ильич Чайковский, Pjotr Il'ič Čajkovskij; listen (help·info))[1] (May 7 [O.S. April 25] 1840 - November 6 [O.S. October 25] 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. While not part of the nationalistic music group known as "The Five", Tchaikovsky wrote music which was distinctly Russian: plangent, introspective, with modally-inflected melody and harmony.[2]
Tchaikovsky considered himself a professional composer. He felt his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his colleagues in "The Five." He shared several of their ideals, including an emphasis on national character in music. His aim, however, was linking those ideals with a professional standard high enough to satsify European criteria. His professionalism also fueled his desire to reach a broad public, not just nationally but also internationally. This he would eventually do.[3]
Aesthetically, Tchaikovsky remained open to all aspects of St Petersburg musical life. He was impressed by Serov and Balakirev as well as the classical values upheld by the conservatory. Both the progressive and conservative camps in Russian music at the time attempted to win him over. Tchaikovsky charted his compositional course between these two factions, retaining his individuality as a composer as well as his Russian identity.[4] A clear summation of Tchaikovsky's approach can be found in Hermann Laroche's review of Sleeping Beauty:
The Russian way in music ... is the issue at hand.... The point is not in the local color, in the internal structure of the music, above all in the foundation of the element of melody. This basic element is undoubtedly Russian. It may be said, without lapsing into contradiction, that the local color [in Sleeping Beauty] is French, but the style is Russian.... One may thank Pyotr Ilyich that his development has coincided with a time when the influences of the soil became stronger among us, when the Russian soul was inspired, when the word "Russian" ceases to be a synonym of "peasant-like," and when the peasant-like itself was recognized in its proper place, as but part of being Russian.[5]
Life
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, a small town in present-day Udmurtia (at the time the Vyatka Guberniya of Imperial Russia). His father, Ilya Petrovitch, was the son of a government mining engineer. His mother, Alexandra, was a Russian woman of partial French ancestry and the second of Ilya's three wives. Pyotr was the older brother (by some ten years) of the dramatist, librettist, and translator Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
In 1843, Tchaikovsky acquired a French governess, Fanny Dürbach. Her love and affection for her charge provided a counter to Alexandra, a cold, unhappy, distant parent not given to displays of physical affection.[6] For all her undemonstrativeness, however, Alexandra doted on Pyotr.[7] Also, by her aloofness and demeanor, she may have seeded her son's lifetime fascination and sympathy for deprived, suffering or otherwise doomed women[8]?-one he would later express musically in such works as Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Francesca da Rimini and Pique Dame.[9]
Pyotr began piano lessons at age five with a local woman. Musically precocious, he could read music as well as his teacher within three years. However, his parents' passion for his musical talent soon cooled. Feeling inferior due to their humble origins, the family sent Pyotr in 1850 to a school for the "lesser nobility" or gentry called the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg to secure him a career as a civil servant. The minimum age for acceptance was 12. For Pyotr, this meant two years boarding at the School of Jurisprudence's preparatory school, 800 miles (1,300 km) from his family. Pyotr adored Alexandra and was already hypersensitive emotionally. He lacked self-confidence and often clung to his mother's skirts.[10] Her abandonment of him at the preparatory school was extremely traumatic. It was to be the first of two brutally symbolic departures.
Early manhood
The second brutal leave-taking came on June 25, 1854 with her death from cholera. This was such a harsh blow that Pyotr could not inform his former governness Fanny Dürbach of it until two years later.[11][12][13][14] He reacted to her loss by turning to music; within a month of her death, he was making his first serious efforts at composition, a waltz in her memory. Several writers, including Poznansky, Holden, and Warrack, have claimed that the loss of his mother was formative on Tchaikovsky's sexual development, in particular because of the close emotional connection he had to her. Regardless, the same-sex practices widespread among students at the all-male School of Jurisprudence,[15][16][17] became his norm. With these proclivities came friendships with fellow students, such as Alexei Apukhin and Vladimir Gerard, intense enough to make up for the loss of his mother and isolation from the rest of his family. Some of these friendships would last the rest of his life.[18]
While music was not considered a high priority at the Institite, Tchaikovsky was taken to the theater and the opera with classmates regularly. He was fond of works by Rossini, Bellini, Verdi and Mozart. A piano manufacturer, Franz Becker, made occasional visits as a token music teacher and gave lessons. This was the only music instruction Tchaikovsky received at school. In 1855, Ilya Tchaikovsky funded private studies outside the Institute for his son with Rudolph Kündinger, a well-known piano teacher from Nuremberg. Ilya also questioned Kündinger about a musical career for his son. He replied that nothing suggested a potential composer or even a fine performer. Tchaikovsky was told to finish his course work, then try for a post in the Ministry of Justice.
Tchaikovsky graduated on May 25, 1859 with the rank of titular counselor, the lowest rung of the civil service ladder. On June 15, he was appointed to the Ministry of Justice. Six months later he became a junior assistant to his department; two months after that, a senior assistant. There Tchaikovsky remained for the rest of his three-year civil service career. In 1861, he attended classes in music theory taught by Nikolai Zaremba through the Russian Musical Society (RMS). The following year he followed Zaremba to the new St Petersburg Conservatory. Tchaikovsky followed but did not give up his civil service post until his father agreed to support him. From 1862 to 1865, he studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Zaremba. Anton Rubinstein, director and founder of the Conservatory, taught him instrumentation and composition. Rubinstein was impressed by Tchaikovsky's talent.
Anton Rubinstein's younger brother Nikolai asked Tchaikovsky after graduation to become professor of harmony, composition, and the history of music at the Moscow Conservatory. Tchaikovsky gladly accepted the position as Ilya had retired and lost his property.
Tchaikovsky and the Five
Tchaikovsky studied with Zaremba as critic Vladimir Stasov and composer Mily Balakirev espoused a nationalistic, less Western-oriented and more locally ideomatic school of Russian music. They recruited what would be known as The Mighty Handful (better known in English as "The Five") in St. Petersburg.
Since he became Anton Rubinstein's best known student, The Five considered Tchaikovsky a natural target for The Five, especially as fodder for Cesar Cui's criticism.[19] This attitude changed slightly when Rubinstein exited the St. Petersburg musical scene in 1867. Tchaikovsky entered into a working relationship with Balakirev. The result was Tchaikovsky's first masterpiece, the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet.
Tchaikovsky remained ambivalent about The Five's music and goals. His relationship with its members was cordial but never close. Later, though, he enjoyed closer relations with Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov and, at least on the surface, the elder Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Beginning with his Fourth Symphony, Tchaikovsky's music became an intense psychic outlet, allowing him to voice frustrations and emotions previously kept bottled up. The importance of Tchaikovsky's homosexuality and its consequences on the personal expression in his compositions cannot be underestimated. Tchaikovsky's gayness in itself has been known to the West for at least 75 years, gathered from the composer's own writings as well as those of his brother Modest, who was also gay.[20][21] More debatable is how well he accepted his sexuality or was comfortable with it. [22]
Tchaikovsky with his wife Antonina Miliukova.Pivotal in letting loose his psychic cataract was Tchaikovsky's ill-starred marriage to one of his former composition students, Antonina Miliukova. Tchaikovsky had decided to "marry whoever will have me" just before Antonina appeared on the scene. His favorite pupil Vladimir Shilovsky had married suddenly in late April 1877.[23] Shilovsky, like Tchaikovsky, was gay.[24] They had shared a mutual bond of affection for just over a decade.[25][26] Shilovsky's wedding may, in turn, have spurred Tchaikovsky to consider such a step himself.[27] He may have hoped in marrying Antonina that marriage would lend him public respectability while he continued having sex privately with other men.[28] The brief time with his wife drove him to the brink of emotional ruin.[29].
Paradoxically, the marriage's strain on Tchaikovsky may have actually enhanced his creativity.[30] The Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin could be considered proof of this. He finished both these works in the six months from his engagement to his "rest cure" in Clarens, Switzerland following his marriage. They are arguably two of his finest compositions.[31]
The intensity of personal emotion now flowing through Tchaikovsky's works was entirely new to Russian music. [32] It prompted Russians to place his name alongside that of novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[32] Like Dostoyevsky's characters, they felt the musical hero in Tchaikovsky's music persisted in exploring the meaning of life while trapped in a fatal love-death-faith triangle.[32] A typical passage about the two reads, "With a hidden passion they both stop at moments of horror, total spiritual collapse, and finding acute sweetness in the cold trepidation of the heart before the abyss, they both force the reader to experience those feelings, too."[33]
Timely benefactress
Four months prior to Antonina's first letter came another at least as significant. Nadezhda von Meck, wealthy widow of a Russian railway tycoon and an influential patron of the arts, wanted to commission some chamber pieces. She eventually paid Tchaikovsky an annual subsidy of 6,000 rubles. This would also allow him to resign from the Moscow Conservatory in October 1878 and concentrate primarily on composition.[34] With von Meck's patronage came a relationship that, at her insistence, was mainly epistolary. They exchanged over 1,200 letters, some of them quite lengthy, between 1877 and 1890. For both of them, these letters would become a solace and a safety valve, filled with details extraordinary for two people who would never meet. Tchaikovsky was more open to von Meck about much of his life and his creative processes than to any other person.
Some could claim legitimately that Tchaikovsky and von Meck's friendship rose to a level similar to that of his future attachment to his nephew, Vladimir "Bob" Davydov.[35] This arrangement can often take place between a woman and a gay man who is spiritually and artistically oriented.[35] A parallel relationship would be the platonic affair between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara. Like von Meck, Vittoria was a mature widow. She withdrew into a convent, from which she exchanged passionate sonnets with Michelangelo. Von Meck remained a fully dedicated supporter of Tchaikovsky and all his works. She took the place of the mother figure he had lost?-and more. She also became a vital enabler in his day-to-day existence. As he explained to her,
There is something so special about our relationship that it often stops me in my tracks with amazement. I have told you more than once, I believe, that you have come to seem to me the hand of Fate itself, watching over me and protecting me. The very fact that I do not know you personally, while feeling so close to you, accords you in my eyes the special status of an unseen but benevolent presence, like a benign Providence.[36]
Tchaikovsky and von Meck also became related by marriage. One of her sons, Nikolay, married Tchaikovsky's niece Anna Davydova in 1884. However, after 13 years von Meck suddenly ended the relationship. She claimed bankruptcy. Tchaikovsky, now a success throughout Europe, no longer needed her money. Her friendship and encouragement were another matter. Losing that companionship devastated him.[37][38][39] [40]
Alexander III of Russia was an admirer of Tchaikovsky's music, conferring the Order of St. Vladimir (fourth class) on the composer.
Later career
Tchaikovsky returned to Moscow Conservatory in the fall of 1879. He had been away from Russia a year after his marriage disintegrated. Shortly into that term, however, he resigned. He settled in Kamenka yet travelled incessantly. Assured of a regular income from von Meck, he wandered around Europe and rural Russia. Not staying long in any one place, he lived mainly alone, avoiding social contact whenever possible. This may have been due partly to troubles with Antonina. She alternately accepted and refused divorce and at one point exacerbated matters by moving into the apartment directly above her husband's.[41][42] Perhaps understandably, his music suffered in quality. Except for his piano trio, which he wrote upon the death of Nikolai Rubinstein, his best work from this period is found in genres which did not depend heavily on personal expression.[41]
While Tchaikovsky's reputation grew rapidly outside Russia, "it was considered obligatory [in progressive musical circles in Russia] to treat Tchaikovsky as a renegade, a master overly dependent on the West," Alexandre Benois wrote in his memoirs.[43] In 1880, this assessment changed practically overnight. During commemoration ceremonies for the Pushkin Monument in Moscow, Dostoyevsky called for the Russian "to become brother to all men, uniman, if you will."[43] Dostoyevsky had been a fervent nationalist. Like Tchaikovsky, though, he also had what Osip Mandelstam termed "a longing for world culture."[43] Focusing on the "European" essence of Pushkin's work, Dostoyevsky's charged that the poet had given a prophetic call to Russia for "universal unity" with the West[43] An unprecedented acclaim for Dostoyevsky's message rushed throughout Russia. Disdain for Tchaikovsky's music dissipated. He even drew a cult following among the young intelligentsia of St. Petersburg, including Benois, Leon Bakst and Sergei Diaghilev.
During 1884, Tchaikovsky began to shed his unsociability and restlessness.[44] In 1885 Tsar Alexander III conferred upon Tchaikovsky the Order of St. Vladimir (fourth class). With it came hereditary nobility. The tsar's decoration was a visible seal of official approval that helped the composer's social rehabilitation.[44] That year he resettled in Russia. 1885 also saw his debut as a guest conductor. Within a year, he was in considerable demand throughout Europe and Russia in appearances which helped him overcome a life-long stage fright and boosted his self-assurance. He wrote von Meck, "Would you now recognize in this Russian musician traveling across Europe that man who, only a few years ago, had absconded from life in society and lived in seclusion abroad or in the country!!!"[45] Conducting brought him to America in 1891. He led the New York Music Society's orchestra in his Marche Slave[46] at the inaugural concert of New York's Carnegie Hall.
In 1893, Cambridge University awarded Tchaikovsky an honorary Doctor of Music degree. Other composers similarly honored on the same occasion included Camille Saint-Saëns, Max Bruch and Arrigo Boito. Edvard Grieg was also to be honored but could not attend due to illness.
Death
Tchaikovsky died on November 6, 1893, nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique. His death has traditionally been attributed to cholera, most probably contracted through drinking contaminated water several days earlier. However, some have theorized his death was a suicide. In one variation of the theory, a sentence of suicide was imposed in a "court of honor" by Tchaikovsky's fellow alumni of the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, as a censure of the composer's sexual preferences.[47][48][49]
Music
Characteristics
Tchaikovsky demonstrated the Romantic ideals of color, emotional expressiveness, and dramatic intensity. Tchaikovsky was also typically Romantic in his choice of subject matter in his operas and symphonic poems. He leaned toward doomed lovers and heroines ?- Romeo and Juliet, Francesca and Paolo (Francesca da Rimini), Tatiana (Eugene Onegin), even the title character from his abandoned opera Undina. Sometimes, as in his final opera, Iolanta, and in his final tone poem, The Voyevode, the love music could outshine the rest of the composition, especially if the music or story was otherwise sub-standard.
Tchaikovsky stood out from many of his contemporaries in his great fund of melody and quality of that melody?-sweet and at times bittersweet in tone, sensuous in the undulations of the melodic line, and lush in texture, yet providing a clear periodic structure. That structure can be obscured by the sheer expansiveness of the musical phrase, as well as by its sequential extension. The love theme in Romeo and Juliet is an example. The theme starts as an eight-bar phrase, the second half a free sequence of the first. This sequence establishes a principle of growth which is used on the theme's recurrence to expand freely and unpredictably. Unlike The Five's work, folk songs and folk-like melodies appear only sporadically in Tchaikovsky's work.
Tchaikovsky was also extremely imaginative in orchestration; he never stopped seeking new timbral combinations. This penchant was drilled into him early, through Anton Rubinstein's exercises at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. It also caused him to run afoul of Rubinstein, choosing instruments his conservative teacher would never use himself.
The major leap Tchaikovsky made in terms of orchestral skill was through the first three orchestral suites.[50] Through these works two changes took place. First, Tchaikovsky's orchestration became tremendously subtler and more sophisticated when needed. Second, he allowed the instrumental sound he desired to dictate the music he would write, instead of vice versa. There would still be touches of novelty, such as his using four accordions in the Second Orchestral Suite and, much later, the celesta solos in The Nutcracker and The Voyevoda. More often, though, his ability to conjure an atmosphere or scene with the colors he chose would become increasingly keener and further ranging, allowing him to expand into the various degrees of fantasy which would incorporate some of his finest work.
Imperial style
Tchaikovsky's musical cosmopolitanism made him especially adept in writing in a Italo-Franco "Imperial style." This style was favored by Tsar Alexander III and the Russian upper classes over the "Russian" harmonies of Mussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.[51]
Imperial style was symbolized by the polonaise, imported into Russia near the end of the 18th century by Jozef Kozlowski, a Polish composer who served in the Russian Army. Kozlowski's greatest musical successes were with his polonaises. He wrote a triumphal polonaise on a text by Derzhavin, "Thunder of Victory, Resound," to celebrate the Russian victory over the Turks in the Ukraine. After that, the polonaise became the preeminent ceremonial gesture in Russia. It became an expression of tsarist patriotism and imperialism. [52] With this cachet came both an opulence and importance in the dance's use:
[T]he polonaise became the supreme courtly form and the most brilliant of all the ballroom genres. The polonaise came to symbolize the European brilliance of eighteenth-century Petersburg [then the capital of Russia] itself. In 'Eugene Onegin Pushkin (like Tchaikovsky) used the polonaise for the climactic entry of Tatiana at the ball in Petersburg. Tolstoy used the polonaise at the climax of the ball in War and Peace, where the Emperor makes his appearance and Natasha dances with Andrei.[53]
Tchaikovsky's phenomenal success in St. Petersburg with the premiere of his Third Orchestral Suite may have been due in large part to his concluding the work with a polonaise.[54] He also used a polonaise for the final movement of his Third Symphony. This led to a misunderstanding when the symphony was performed in the West. Western nations, more familiar with the polonaise as used by Frédéric Chopin, subtitled the symphony Polish. They considered the finale an expression of a Polish longing for freedom and national resurgence. The real meaning of the polonaise in the symphony was the exact opposite. Like the finales of Tchaikovsky's first two symphonies, the finale of the Third was meant to appeal to the patriotic sentiment of the Russian aristocracy?-precisely the people who wanted to keep the Poles yoked to the tsarist regime.[55]
Tchaikovsky used a Russian folk song in the finale of the First Symphony and a Ukranian folk song in the finale of the Second. Both times, as with the Third, he did so to glorify the Russian empire and the victories of Russian arms.[56] This theme, traditional in Russian culture, was first sounded by Pushkin. The defeat of Napoleon led to a rapid expansion of the empire and the ethnic variety of its peoples. A subsequent and growing appetite in the capital for further conquests was reflected in Russian music.[56] Even the finales of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies could be argued to be in imperial vein.[57] Neither finale works satisfactorily as either a strictly formal or psychological apotheosis for their respective works. However, as patriotic and heroic appeals?-the Fourth by repeating the opening motto at a climactic point and the Fifth with a version of the opening melody of the introduction transposed to a major key?-both could be heard to serve just that purpose.[58]
Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, painted by Adolph Northen.Tchaikovsky made full use of the emotional and symbolic possibilities of the Russian anthem "God Save the Tsar" in several commemorative works, including two of his most popular compositions, the Marche Slave and the 1812 Overture. Tchaikovsky wrote Marche Slave in support of Pan-Slavism. This was one of the most cherished ideas of imperial Russia. When Serbia rebelled against Turkish rule in 1876, the atmosphere in Russia toward the Serbs became electric. Performances of the Marche Slave, with its Serbian folk melodies, inevitably elicited outbursts of patriotism. This was something the equally patriotic composer did not mind one bit. The 1812 Overture likewise glorified the greatest military and political victory of the Romanov dynasty, in the Patriotic War against Napoleon.
Aesthetics
Tchaikovsky differed aesthetically from his contemporaries, with his art as well as his artistic sensibilities leaning closer to Mozart and Mendelssohn than to the music of Russians such as Mussorgsky and the other members of The Five. In one sense this is not a surprise. Russia in Tchaikovsky's day was considered in some respects "the last eighteenth-century state." This placed him in circumstances Mozart or Beethoven might have found congenial. He enjoyed an extensive system of artistic patronage. Nadezhda von Meck was not his only sponsor, simply his most noted one. Others were more closely connected to the tsarist court. These included Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theatres; Prince Meshchersky, a leading politician and counselor to Alexander III; and Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantonovich, a cousin of Alexander III.[59]
From 1885, Tchaikovsky also enjoyed the direct patronage of Alexander III. The tsar asked personally for a new production of Eugene Onegin to be staged in St. Petersburg. The opera had previously been seen only in Moscow, produced by a student ensemble from the conservatory. He had Onegin staged not at the Mariyinsky Theater but in the Bolshoi kamennïy theater. This act served notice that Tchaikovsky's music was replacing Italian opera as the official imperial art. Thanks to Vsevolozhsky, Tchaikovsky received a lifetime pension of 3000 rubles per year from the tsar. This essentially made him the premier court composer, at least in practice if not in actual title.[60]
Russia's society was paternalistic. Members of the higher classes patronized those of the lower. Tchaikovsky could therefore count on the support of the higher ranks of the aristocracy. An essential feature of this artistic patronage was that patron and artist were considered equals. While it is well-known that Tchaikovsky and von Meck discussed a variety of subjects as equals, he and Konstantin Konstantonovich enjoyed a similarly straightforward (though less intimate) relationship.[61] Dedications of works to patrons were not gestures of humble gratitude but expressions of artistic partnership. The dedication of the Fourth Symphony to von Meck is known to be a seal on their friendship. His relationship with Konstantin Konstantinovich bore creative fruit in the Six Songs, Op. 63, for which the grand duke wrote the words.[62]
As his career advanced, Tchaikovsky increasingly became the embodiment of the artistic values cherished by the aristocracy.[61] For Tchaikovsky, there was no conflict between the artist and his public. Highly sensitive to external circumstances and expectations, he searched constantly for new ways of reaching the public. He saw no harm in playing on the tastes of particular audiences. The patriotic themes and stylization of 18th-Century melodies in his works lined up with the values of the Russian aristocracy; and using the polonaise, the musical symbol of Russian patriotism, as a finale was one of Tchaikovsky's recepes for success.[63]
Tchaikovsky's idea of music was to a large extent based on its aesthetic impact. He felt the high demands of Wagner's music on its audiences conflicted with this criterion. His objections to Brahms were similar. He felt Brahms's music lacked what was most important?-beauty. He sought tne expressive value in music that was immediately comprehensible and appreciable?-in other words, what was apparent on the surface. He admired Bizet's Carmen for exactly this reason. "This music has no pretensions to profundity, but it is so charming in its simplicity, so vigorous, not contrived but instead sincere, that I learned all of it from beginning to end almost by heart." Mozart aroused tremendous fascination in Tchaikovsky. While he loved Mozart's music, it was also a mystery to him, especially in the way Mozart combined simplicity with profundity.[64]
While many may immediately think of self-expression when they hear the name "Tchaikovsky", it was not necessarily central to him.[65] In a letter to von Meck dated December 5, 1878, he explained there were two kinds of inspiration for a symphonic composer, a subjective and an objective one:
In the first instance, [the composer] uses his music to express his own feelings, joys, sufferings; in short, like a lyric poet he pours out, so to speak, his own soul. In this instance, a program is not only not necessary but even impossible. But it is another matter when a musician, reading a poetic work or struck by a scene in nature, wishes to express in musical form that subject that has kindled his inspiration. Here a program is essential.... Program music can and must exist, just as it is impossible to demand that literature make do without the epic element and limit itself to lyricism alone.
Mozart aroused tremendous fascination in Tchaikovsky. Detail from unfinished portrait of Mozart by Joseph Lange.This meant program music such as Francesca da Rimini or the Manfred Symphony was as much a part of their composer's artistic credo as the expression of his "lyric ego."[66] While he could feel a great deal of sympathy for his subjects, sympathy does not necessarily mean identification. Labeling all his works based on literary subjects as confessional music would be unwarranted. The character of Hermann in Pique Dame has sometimes been mentioned as an expression of the composer's morbidity and suicidal tendencies. Tchaikovsky's letters and diary entries disprove this notion, showing that he did not identify with Hermann. His diary entry for March 2, 1890, when he had just completed the opera, shows a characteristic mixture of empathy and detachmant. "Wept terribly when Hermann breathed his last. The result of exhaustion, or maybe it is truly good."[67]
There is also a group of compositions which fall outside the dichotomy of program music versus "lyrical ego," where he hearkens toward pre-Romantic aesthetics. Works in this group include the orchestral suites, Capriccio Italien and the Serenade for Strings.[68] He displays his clearest link to pre-Romantic sensitivities in retrospective works such as the Variations on a Rococo Theme and Mozartiana, a collection of orchestrations based on Mozart piano pieces and a Liszt transcription of a Mozart work. The Violin Concerto also looks back to pre-Romantic aesthetics. While Tchaikovsky does not follow classical practice, most notably in the lack of a double exposition in the first movement, he also does not follow the conventions of other 19th-Century violin concertos. It is not written as a virtuosic work for virtuosity's sake, like Paganini's concertos, nor virtuosity used to express a symphonic concept, as in the Brahms Violin Concerto. The tone of the orchestral introduction could almost be considered classicist; the same is true for the transparent orchestration, with the orchestra itself relegated for the most part to background for the soloist.[69]
Few compositions are as far removed from the idea of Tchaikovsky as musical confessor as the orchestral suites, yet they are entirely true to his pre-Romantic ideal. They were an outgrowth of a trend beginning in Germany following the rediscovering of Bach's orchestral suites, and he valued the genre for formal freedom as well as its unrestricted musical fantasy.[70] Capriccio italien, an urban tableau evoking Italian urban folklore, was the continuation of a tradition begun with Haydn and Mozart.[69] The Serenade for Strings was intended as a tribute to Mozart. While not copying any style, Tchaikovsky attempts to convert the spirit of the Classicl approach into his own compositional idiom. The Serenade's unique tone comes from a subtle balance between Tchaikovsky's lyrical sentimentality and his attention to classical measure and clarity.[71]
Tchaikovsky may have best summed his perception of music himself to von Meck: "It alone clarifies, reconciles, and consoles. But it is not a straw just barely clutched at. It is a faithful friend, protector, and comforter, and for its sake alone, life in this world is worth living."[67]
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:07 am
George 'Gabby' Hayes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born George Francis Hayes
May 7, 1885(1885-05-07)
Wellsville, New York
Died February 9, 1969, age 83
Burbank, California
George Francis 'Gabby' Hayes (May 7, 1885 - February 9, 1969) was an American actor. He was best known for his numerous appearances in western movies as the colorful sidekick to the leading man. (Not to be confused with British character actor George Hayes [1888-1967], who made a few movies in the U.S.)
Early years
Hayes was born the third of seven children in Wellsville, New York, and did not come from a cowboy background. In fact, he did not know how to ride a horse until he was in his forties and had to learn for movie roles. His father, Clark Hayes, operated a hotel and was also involved in oil production. George Hayes played semi-professional baseball while in high school, then ran away from home in 1902, at 17. He joined a stock company, apparently traveled for a time with a circus, and became a successful vaudevillian. He had become so successful that by 1928 he was able, at 43, to retire to a home on Long Island in Baldwin, New York. He lost all his savings the next year in the 1929 stock-market crash and returned to acting.
Hayes married Olive E. Ireland, daughter of a New Jersey glass finisher, on March 4, 1914. She joined him in vaudeville, performing under the name Dorothy Earle (not to be confused with film actress/writer Dorothy Earle). She convinced him in 1929 to try his luck in motion pictures, and the couple moved to Los Angeles. They remained together until her death July 5, 1957. The couple had no children.
Film career
On his move to Los Angeles, according to later interviews, Hayes had a chance meeting with producer Trem Carr, who liked his look and gave him thirty roles over the next six years. In his early career, Hayes was cast in a variety of roles, including villains, and occasionally played two roles in a single film. He found a niche in the growing genre of western films, many of which were series with recurring characters. Ironically, Hayes would admit he had never been a big fan of westerns.
Hayes, in real life an intelligent, well groomed, and articulate man, was cast as a grizzled codger who uttered phrases like "consarn it", "yer durn tootin", "durn persnickety female", and "young whippersnapper".
Hayes played the part of Windy Halliday, the sidekick to Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd), from 1935 to 1939. In 1939, Hayes left Paramount Pictures in a dispute over his salary and moved to Republic Pictures. Paramount held the rights to the name Windy Halliday, so a new nickname was created for Hayes' character; Gabby. As Gabby Whitaker, Hayes appeared in more than 40 pictures between 1939 and 1946, usually with Roy Rogers but also with Gene Autry or Bill Elliot, often working under the directorship of Joseph Kane.
Hayes was also repeatedly cast as a sidekick to western icons Randolph Scott and John Wayne. In fact, Wayne and Hayes made numerous films together in the very early 1930s with Hayes playing "straight" pre-sidekick roles, and sometimes even the villain. Hayes became a popular performer and consistently appeared among the ten favorite actors in polls taken of movie-goers of the period. He appeared in either or both the Motion Picture Herald and Boxoffice Magazine lists of Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars for twelve straight years and a thirteenth time in 1954, four years after his last movie.
The western film genre declined in the late 1940s and Hayes made his last film appearance in The Cariboo Trail (1950). He moved to television and hosted The Gabby Hayes Show, a western series, from 1950 to 1954, and a new version in 1956. He introduced the show, often while whittling on a piece of wood and would sometimes throw in some tall stories. Half way through the show he would say something else and at the end too but he did not appear as an active character in the stories themselves. When the series ended he retired from show business. He lent his name to a comic book series and to a children's summer camp in New York. Following his wife's death in 1957, he lived in and managed a ten-unit apartment building he owned in North Hollywood, California. In early 1969, he entered St. John Hospital in Burbank, California for treatment of cardiovascular disease. He died there on February 9, 1969, at the age of 83. George 'Gabby' Hayes was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.
Honors
For his contribution to radio, Gabby Hayes has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6427 Hollywood Blvd. and a second star at 1724 Vine Street for his contribution to the television industry. In 2000, he was posthumously inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Homages
Homage was paid to Hayes in a different way in the 1974 satirical western Blazing Saddles. A look-a-like actor named Claude Ennis Starrett, Jr. played a Gabby Hayes-like character. In keeping with one running joke in the movie, the character was called Gabby Johnson. After he delivered a rousing, though largely unintelligible speech to the townspeople ("You get back here you pious candy-ass sidewinder. Ain't no way that nobody is gonna' to leave this town. Hell, I was born here, an' I was raished here, an' dad gum it, I am gonna die here an' no sidewindin bushwackin, hornswaglin, cracker croaker is gonna rouin me biscuit cutter."), David Huddleston's character proclaimed, "Now, who can argue with that?!" and described it as "authentic frontier gibberish." Gabby was also immortalized once again in the Simpsons episode where Milhouse become "Fallout boy". the producer of the film comments that Milhouse is "..going to be big, Gabby Hayes big!"
Additionally, every year in April at the beginning of fishing season in Pennsylvania, the Gabby Hayes Memorial Fishing Tournament is held. The first tournament was held in 1969, the year of Hayes's death.
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:12 am
Gary Cooper
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born Frank James Cooper
May 7, 1901(1901-05-07)
Helena, Montana, U.S.
Died May 13, 1961 (aged 60)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Years active 1923-1961
Spouse(s) Veronica Balfe (1933-1961)
[show]Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Actor
1941 Sergeant York
1952 High Noon
Academy Honorary Award
1961 Lifetime Achievement
Golden Globe Awards
Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
1953 High Noon
Frank James "Gary" Cooper May 7, 1901 - May 13, 1961) was an American two-time Academy Award-winning film actor of English heritage. His career spanned from 1924 until 1961, the year of his death. In that timespan he made one hundred films. He was renowned for his quiet, understated acting style and his stoic, individualistic, emotionally restrained, but at times intense screen persona, which was particularly well suited for the many Westerns he made.
Cooper received five Oscar nominations for Best Actor, winning twice. He also received an Honorary Award from the Academy in 1961. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Cooper among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at No. 11.
Biography
Childhood
Cooper was born Frank James Cooper in Helena, Montana, one of two sons of a Bedfordshire, England, farmer turned American lawyer and judge, Charles Henry Cooper, and Kent, England-born Alice (née Brazier) Cooper.[1] His mother hoped for their two sons to receive a better education than that available in rough-hewn Montana and arranged for the boys to attend Dunstable School in England between 1910 and 1913. Upon the outbreak of World War I, Mrs. Cooper brought her sons home and enrolled young Frank in a Bozeman, Montana, high school.
When he was 13, Cooper injured his hip in an automobile accident. He returned to the ranch his parents owned near Helena to recuperate by horseback riding, at the recommendation of his doctor. Cooper started college at Montana Wesleyan (now defunct) in Helena[citation needed], then transferred to Iowa's Grinnell College, where he tried out, unsuccessfully, for the Drama Club. He attended until the spring of 1924 but did not graduate. [2] He then returned to Helena, managing the ranch and contributing cartoons to the local paper. In 1924, Cooper's father left the Montana Supreme Court bench and moved with his wife to Los Angeles. Their son, unable to make a living as an editorial cartoonist in Helena, joined them, [3] reasoning that he "would rather starve where it was warm, than to starve and freeze too" [4]
Hollywood
Failing as a salesman of both electric signs and theatrical curtains, as a promoter for a local photographer, and as an applicant for newspaper work in Los Angeles,[5] the 6 ft 3 in (190 cm) Cooper found he could earn money as an "extra" in the motion picture industry, usually cast as a cowboy; he is known to have been in an uncredited role in the 1925 Tom Mix Western, Dick Turpin.[6] A year later, he had screen credit in a two-reeler, Lightnin' Wins, with actress Eileen Sedgewick as his leading lady. After the release of this short film, he accepted a long-term contract with Paramount Pictures. He changed his name to Gary in 1925, following the advice of casting director Nan Collins, who felt it evoked the "rough, tough" nature of her native Gary, Indiana.[7]
in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)"Coop", as he was called by his peers, went on to appear in over 100 films. He became a major star with his first sound picture, The Virginian, in 1929. The lead in the screen adaptation of A Farewell to Arms (1932) and the title role in 1936's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town furthered his box office appeal. Cooper was producer David O. Selznick's first choice for the role of Rhett Butler in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.[8] When Cooper turned down the role, he was passionately against it. He is quoted as saying, "Gone with the Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I'm glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling flat on his nose, not me".[9][10] Alfred Hitchcock wanted him to star in Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Saboteur (1942). Cooper later admitted he had made a "mistake" in turning down the director. For the former film, Hitchcock cast look-alike Joel McCrea instead.
In 1942, he won his first Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as the title character in Sergeant York. Alvin York refused to authorize a movie about his life unless Gary Cooper portrayed him. In 1953, Cooper won his second Best Actor Academy Award for his performance as Marshal Will Kane in High Noon, considered his finest role. Ill with an ulcer, he wasn't present to receive his Academy Award in February 1953. He asked John Wayne to accept it on his behalf, a bit of irony in light of Wayne's stated distaste for the film.[11]
Cooper continued to appear in films almost to the end of his life. Among his later box office hits was his portrayal of a Quaker farmer during the Civil War in William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion in 1956. His final motion picture was a British film, The Naked Edge (1961), directed by Michael Anderson. Among his final projects was narrating an NBC documentary, The Real West, in which he helped clear up myths about famous Western figures.
Private life
In October 1947, Cooper testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He did not name names, but was considered a friendly witness. Although Cooper was politically conservative, his vague, evasive statements raised questions about his agreement with the proceedings.
Cooper had high-profile relationships with actresses Clara Bow, Lupe Vélez, and the American-born socialite-spy Countess Carla Dentice di Frasso (née Dorothy Caldwell Taylor, formerly wife of British pioneer aviator Claude Grahame-White).
On December 15, 1933, Cooper wed Veronica Balfe, (May 27, 1913 - February 16, 2000). Balfe was a New York Roman Catholic socialite who had briefly acted under the name of Sandra Shaw. She appeared in the film No Other Woman, but her most widely seen role was in King Kong, as the woman dropped by Kong. Her third and final movie was Blood Money. Her father was governor of the New York Stock Exchange, and her uncle was Cedric Gibbons. During the 1930s she also became the California state women's Skeet Champion. They had one child, Maria, now Maria Cooper Janis, married to classical pianist Byron Janis.
Eventually, his wife persuaded Cooper to become a Roman Catholic in 1958. After he was married, but prior to his conversion, Cooper had affairs with several famous co-stars, including Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, and Patricia Neal. Cooper's daughter Maria, when she was a little girl, famously spat at Neal, but many years later, the two became friends. Cooper separated from his wife between 1951 and 1954.
He was friends with Ernest Hemingway, and spent many vacations with the writer in the winter wonderland of Sun Valley, Idaho.
In 1961, Cooper died of prostate cancer six days after his 60th birthday, and was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Years later, his body was moved to Sacred Heart Cemetery, Southampton, New York.[12] He had undergone surgery for prostate cancer which had spread to his colon in the previous year, but as there were no means of monitoring the progress of cancer in those days it then spread to his lungs and then, most painfully, to his bones. Cooper was too ill to attend the Academy Awards ceremony in April 1961, so his close friend James Stewart accepted the honorary Oscar on his behalf. Stewart's emotional speech hinted that something was seriously wrong, and the next day newspapers all over the world ran the headline, "Gary Cooper has cancer". One month later Cooper was dead.
Legacy
For his contribution to the film industry, Gary Cooper has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6243 Hollywood Blvd. In 1966, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His name has also been immortalized in Irving Berlin's song "Puttin' on the Ritz" with the line, "Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper, (super duper)".
Charlton Heston often cited Cooper as a childhood role model, and later got to work with him on The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959). Heston praised Cooper for doing his own stunts despite his age and poor health. He has been briefly mentioned a few times on the HBO drama, The Sopranos, when the main character, Tony Soprano, remarks that he admired Gary Cooper for being the strong, silent type.
Morgan Freeman while being interviewed on The Adam Carolla Show in 2007, stated that watching Cooper as a young man has inspired him to act.
On the list AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains chosen by American Film Institute in 2003, Gary Cooper is the only actor to appear three times; in all three he appeared as a hero.
In Life on Mars, a British television series in the environment of 1970s policing DCI Gene Hunt (Phillip Glenister) referred to Gary Cooper as a god amongst men.
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:14 am
David Tomlinson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born David Cecil MacAlister Tomlinson
May 7, 1917(1917-05-07)
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England
Died June 24, 2000 (aged 83)
Westminster, London, England
Spouse(s) Audrey Freeman
Awards won
Academy Awards
Nominated best actor in a supporting role 1968
David Cecil MacAlister Tomlinson (May 7, 1917 - June 24, 2000) was an English film actor. He is primarily remembered for his role as George Banks in the movie Mary Poppins.
Early life
Born in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England on May 7, 1917 [1], Tomlinson attended the Tonbridge School, but left to join the Grenadier Guards. His introduction to the working world came as a clerk for London's Shell House. His stage career grew from amateur stage productions to his 1940 film debut in Quiet Wedding. His career was interrupted when he entered WWII service as a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF. His flying days continued after the war and he crashed a Tiger Moth plane near his backyard much to the chagrin of his neighbours. His father Clarence, a prominent London lawyer, defended him at his subsequent trial (for flying too low).
Film career
As George Banks, head of the Banks family in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins, David Tomlinson was known to generations of children for his role in one of the most popular family films of all time. Although Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke's characters are often seen as the breath of fresh air brushing through the Banks' home, Mr. Banks' role, and indeed Tomlinson's performance, is also noteworthy. Mr. Banks is a senior figure in a bank who takes his job very seriously and has little time for or patience with his children. Following a riot at the bank precipitated by the actions of his young son his character is forced to relinquish his job in a moving scene in which his bowler hat and umbrella are symbolically destroyed. By the end of the film, however, Mr. Banks is finally made a partner of the bank in a touching performance from Tomlinson, and Mary Poppins decides that her services are no longer required as Mr. Banks has learned to engage with his children on their level.
Mary Poppins brought Tomlinson continued work with Disney, appearing in The Love Bug (1969) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Throughout the rest of Tomlinson's film career, he never steered far from comedies.
As a testament to Tomlinson's decency and popularity with other entertainers, when Peter Sellers was recuperating in a London hospital following a heart attack he apparently said: "I only want to see David."
Personal life
Tomlinson was married for 57 years to actress Audrey Freeman and the two had four sons, David Jr., William, Henry and James. He died peacefully in his sleep at the King Edward the VII Hospital, Westminster at 0400 on June 24, 2000 [2] [3] after suffering a series of strokes. Tomlinson was 83 years old.
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:17 am
Darren McGavin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born William Lyle Richardson
May 7, 1922(1922-05-07)
Spokane, Washington
Died February 25, 2006 (aged 83)
Los Angeles, California
Years active 1940-2006
Spouse(s) Kathie Browne
Melanie York
William Lyle Richardson (May 7, 1922 - February 25, 2006), who adopted the name Darren McGavin, was an American actor best known for playing the title role in the television horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and also his portrayal in the movie A Christmas Story of the grumpy father given to bursts of profanity that he never realizes his son overhears. He also appeared as the tough-talking, funny detective in the TV series Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.
Childhood
McGavin was born in Spokane, Washington, to Reid Delano Richardson and Grace McGavin. However, some sources list his birthplace as San Joaquin, California.
In magazine interviews during the 1960s, he stated that his parents divorced when he was very young and that his father, not knowing what else to do, put him in an orphanage at the age of 11. McGavin began to run away, often sleeping on the docks and in warehouses. He ended up in three orphanages. The last one was a boy's home, which turned out to be a safe haven for McGavin. He lived there for a few years where there were farm chores assigned, along with several other boys who were abandoned like himself. McGavin said that the owners of the home helped him to establish a sense of pride and responsibility, and that this helped to turn his life around.
Career
Still untrained as an actor, McGavin worked as a painter in the paint crew at the Columbia Pictures movie studios in 1945. When an opening became available for a bit part in A Song to Remember, the movie set on which he was working, McGavin applied for the role. He was hired for it, and that was his first foray into movie acting. (He had spent a year at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.) Shortly afterwards, he moved to New York City and spent a decade of learning the acting craft in TV and the plays there. McGavin studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio under the famous teacher Sanford Meisner and began working in live TV drama and on Broadway. A few of the plays in which he starred included The Rainmaker (where he created the title role on Broadway), The King and I and Death of a Salesman.
McGavin returned to Hollywood and became a busy actor in a wide variety of TV and movie roles; in 1955 he broke through with roles in the films Summertime and The Man with the Golden Arm. Over the course of his career, McGavin starred in seven different TV series and guest-starred in many more; these roles on television increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s with leading parts in series such as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer and Riverboat.
When the comedy team Martin and Lewis broke up as a result of Dean Martin's refusal to play a cop in a movie, McGavin played the role originally earmarked for Martin in The Delicate Delinquent, Jerry Lewis's first solo film.
McGavin was also the top contender to replace Larry Hagman as the male lead of the television series I Dream of Jeannie.
McGavin was also known for his role as Sam Parkhill in the miniseries adaptation of The Martian Chronicles. He appeared as a fill-in regular in The Name of the Game in 1971 after Tony Franciosa was dismissed; he, Peter Falk, Robert Culp, and Robert Wagner stepped in to rotate in the lead role with Gene Barry and Robert Stack.
The first of his two best-known roles came in 1972, in the supernatural-themed TV movie The Night Stalker (1972). With McGavin playing a reporter who discovers the activities of a modern-day vampire on the loose in Las Vegas, the film became the highest-rated made-for-TV movie in history at that time; and when the sequel The Night Strangler (1973) also was a strong success, a subsequent television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) was made. In the series, McGavin played Carl Kolchak, an investigative reporter for a Chicago-based news service who regularly stumbles upon the supernatural or occult basis for a seemingly mundane crime; although his involvement routinely assisted in the dispelment of the otherworldly adversary, his evidence in the case was always destroyed or seized, usually by a public official or major social figure who sought to cover up the incident. He would write his ensuing stories in a sensational, tabloid style which advised readers that the true story was being withheld from them.
Kolchak was the inspiration for the series The X-Files and due to this, McGavin was asked to play the role of Arthur Dales, the man who started the X-Files, in three episodes: Season 5's "Travelers" and two episodes from Season 6, "Agua Mala" and "The Unnatural". Unfortunately, failing health forced him to withdraw from the latter, and the script (written and directed by series star David Duchovny) was rewritten to feature M. Emmet Walsh as Dales's brother, also called Arthur.
In 1983, he starred as "Old Man Parker", the narrator's father, in the movie A Christmas Story. Opposite Melinda Dillon as the narrator's mother, he portrayed an ornery, irascible working-class father, in 1940 Hohman, Indiana [1] who was endearing in spite of his being comically oblivious to his own use of profanity and completely unable to recognize his unfortunate taste for kitsch. Blissfully unaware of his family's embarrassment by his behavior, he took pride in his self-assessed ability to fix anything in record time, and carried on a tireless campaign against his neighbor's rampaging bloodhounds.
McGavin made an uncredited appearance in 1984's The Natural as a shady gambler and appeared on a Christmas episode ("Midnight of the Century") of Millennium, playing the long-estranged father of Frank Black (Lance Henriksen); he also appeared as Adam Sandler's hotel-magnate father in the 1995 movie Billy Madison.
During the filming of The Natural, Robert Redford was so pleased with McGavin's portrayal of his character that they began to expand the role. However, after a certain point, union rules dictated that the actor's contract needed to be renegotiated for salary and billing. After haggling on salary, and holding up production of the movie because of it, the billing had to be decided. McGavin became somewhat fed up with the proceedings and instructed his agent to waive his billing entirely so they could get back to filming.
He won a CableACE Award (for the 1991 TV movie Clara) and received a 1990 Emmy Award as an Outstanding Guest Star in a Comedy Series on Murphy Brown, in which he played Murphy's father.
McGavin was married twice in long-term marriages:
Melanie York (March 20, 1944 to 1969), producing four children (Bogart, York, Megan, and Bridget McGavin), ending in divorce;
Kathie Browne (December 31, 1969 - April 8, 2003), ending at her death.
It is unclear whether McGavin was in naval or other military service in World War II, although he was then in his early twenties and thus eligible.
On February 25, 2006, McGavin died of natural causes in a Los Angeles-area hospital, according to his son, Bogart McGavin.[2]
He was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.
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bobsmythhawk
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:20 am
Anne Baxter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born May 7, 1923(1923-05-07)
Michigan City, Indiana
Died December 12, 1985 (aged 62)
New York City, New York
Years active 1940 - 1983
Spouse(s) John Hodiak (1946-1953)
Randolph Galt (1960-1969)
David Klee (1977-1977)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Supporting Actress
1946 The Razor's Edge
Golden Globe Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture
1947 The Razor's Edge
Anne Baxter (May 7, 1923 - December 12, 1985) was an Academy Award-winning American actress.
Early life
Baxter was born in Michigan City, Indiana to Kenneth Stuart Baxter and Catherine Wright;[1] her maternal grandfather was the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Baxter's father was a prominent executive with the Seagrams Distillery Co. and she was raised in New York City amidst luxury and sophistication. At age ten, Baxter attended a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes, and was so impressed that she declared to her family that she wanted to become an actress. By the age of thirteen, Anne had appeared on Broadway. During this period, Baxter learned her acting craft as a student of the famed teacher Maria Ouspenskaya.
Career
Baxter screen-tested for the role of Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca, but lost out to Joan Fontaine because director Alfred Hitchcock considered her "too young" for the role. The strength of that first foray into movie acting secured the then sixteen-year-old Baxter a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Her first movie role was in 20 Mule Team in 1940. She was chosen by director Orson Welles to appear in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), based on the novel by Booth Tarkington. Baxter co-starred with Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in 1946's The Razor's Edge, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In 1950 she was chosen to co-star in All About Eve, largely because of a resemblance to Claudette Colbert, who had initially been chosen to co-star in the film. Baxter received a nomination for Best Actress for the title role of Eve Harrington. Later during that decade, Baxter also continued to act in professional theater. According to a program from the production, Baxter appeared on Broadway in 1953 opposite Tyrone Power in Charles Laughton's John Brown's Body, a play based upon the narrative poem by Stephen Vincent Benét (though the Internet Broadway Database states that Power's co-star was Judith Anderson).
Baxter is also remembered for her compelling role as the Egyptian princess Nefertiri opposite Charlton Heston's portrayal of Moses in Cecil B. Demille's award winning The Ten Commandments (1956).
Baxter appeared regularly on television in the 1960s. For example, she did a stint as one of the What's My Line? Mystery Guests on the popular Sunday Night CBS-TV program. She also starred as the special guest villain "Zelda the Great" in two episodes of the 60s superhero show Batman. She also appeared as the special guest villain "Olga, Queen of the Cossacks" opposite Vincent Price's "Egghead" in three episodes of the show's third season.
Baxter appeared again on Broadway during the 1970s, in Applause, the musical version of All About Eve, but this time in the "Margo Channing" role played by Bette Davis in the film (she was replacing Lauren Bacall, who won a Tony Award in the role). Bette Davis tells, in one of her biographies, of attending one such performance by Baxter, to their mutual delight.[citation needed]
In the 1970s, Baxter was a frequent guest and stand-in host on the popular daytime TV talk-fest The Mike Douglas Show, since Baxter and host Mike Douglas were friends. She portrayed a homicidal movie star on an episode of Columbo.
In 1983, the actress starred in the television series Hotel, replacing Bette Davis in the cast after Davis took ill. Baxter has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6741 Hollywood Blvd.
Private life
In the 1950s, Baxter was married to and then divorced from actor John Hodiak. That union produced Baxter's oldest daughter, Katrina. In 1961, Baxter and her second husband, Randolph Galt, left the United States to live and raise their children on a cattle station in the Australian outback. She told the story in her memoir Intermission: A True Story. In the book, Baxter blamed the failure of her first marriage to Hodiak on herself.
Though her second marriage to Galt did not last much longer, Baxter and Galt had two daughters together: Melissa Galt and Maginel Galt. Privately during this period, Baxter chose to refer to herself as Ann Galt amongst her neighbors in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, probably as a way to downplay her star status and to raise her daughters as normally as possible. Baxter was briefly married again in 1977 to David Klee, a prominent stockbroker, but was widowed when he died unexpectedly due to illness; Baxter never remarried. They had purchased a sprawling property in Easton, Connecticut which was extensively remodeled, but Klee did not live to see the renovations completed. The house itself was architecturally reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's flat-roofed structures. Baxter remodeled the living room fireplace to resemble the fireplace in her grandfather's masterpiece, Fallingwater. Although Baxter maintained a residence in West Hollywood, California, she considered her beloved Connecticut home to be her primary residence.
Baxter died from a brain aneurysm on December 12, 1985, while walking down Madison Avenue in New York City. She is buried on the estate of Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin.[2]
Baxter was survived by her three adult daughters. Baxter was a lifelong friend of the late costume designer Edith Head, who appeared with Baxter in a cameo role in the Columbo episode in which Baxter starred. Upon Head's death in 1981, Baxter's daughter Melissa was bequeathed her extraordinary collection of jewelry. Melissa Galt today works as an interior designer in Atlanta. Her oldest daughter, Katrina Hodiak, ultimately married and had children. Baxter's daughter Maginel Galt is reportedly a Catholic nun living and working in Rome, Italy.
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bobsmythhawk
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:23 am
Teresa Brewer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Birth name Theresa Breuer
Born May 7, 1931(1931-05-07)
Toledo, Ohio,
Died October 17, 2007 (aged 76)
New Rochelle, New York
Genre(s) Traditional pop
Years active 1949-1970s
Label(s) London, Coral, Philips
Website Teresa Brewer Center
Teresa Brewer (May 7, 1931 - October 17, 2007) was an American pop and jazz singer who was one of the most popular female singers of the 1950s. Born Theresa Breuer in Toledo, Ohio, Brewer died of a neuromuscular disease at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. at the age of 76.[1]
Life and career
Brewer's father was an inspector of glass for the Libbey Owens Company (now Pilkington Glass); her mother was a housewife. At the age of two, Theresa was brought by her mother to audition for a radio program, "Uncle August's Kiddie Show" on Toledo's WSPD.
She performed for cookies and cupcakes donated by the sponsor. Although she never took singing lessons, she took tap dancing lessons. From age five to twelve, she toured with the "Major Bowes Amateur Hour", then a popular radio show, both singing and dancing. Her aunt Mary traveled with Theresa until 1949, when Theresa married. She was devoted to her aunt, who shared Brewer's home until her death in 1993.
At the age of 12, Theresa was brought back to Toledo, ceasing touring to have a normal school life. She continued to perform on local radio. In January 1948 the 16 years-old Theresa won a local competition and (with three other winners) was sent to New York to appear on a talent show called "Stairway to the Stars", featuring Eddie Dowling. It was about that time that she changed the spelling of her name from Theresa Breuer to Teresa Brewer. She won a number of talent shows and played night clubs in New York (including the famous Latin Quarter).
An agent, Richie Lisella, heard her sing and took her career in hand, and soon she was signed to a contract with London Records. In 1949 she recorded a record called "Copenhagen" with the Dixieland All-Stars. The B side was a song called "Music! Music! Music!" by Stephen Weiss and Bernie Baum. Unexpectedly, it was not the A side but the B side that took off, selling over a million copies, and it became Teresa's signature song.
Another novelty song, "Choo'n Gum", hit the top 20 in 1950, followed by "Molasses, Molasses". Although she preferred to sing ballads, the only one of those that made the charts was "Longing for You" in 1951.
In 1951 she switched labels, going to Coral Records. By this time she was married with a daughter, Kathleen. Since she never learned to read music, she had a demo sent to her to learn the tunes of her songs. Even so, she had a number of hits for Coral, though one of her recordings, "Gonna Get Along Without You Now" (1952) was better known in a 1956 version by Patience and Prudence and was also a hit in 1964 for Skeeter Davis as well as Tracey Dey. Also that year she recorded "You'll Never Get Away" in a duet with Don Cornell, and in 1953 came her best selling hit, "Till I Waltz Again with You".
More 1953 hits were "Dancin' with Someone," "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall", and another gold record, "Ricochet". In later years she followed with "Baby, Baby, Baby", "Bell Bottom Blues", "Our Heartbreaking Waltz" (written by Sidney Prosen, who had written "Till I Waltz Again With You"), and "Skinnie Minnie". During those years she continued to play the big night clubs in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and elsewhere.
In the mid-50s, she did a number of covers of rhythm and blues songs like "Pledging My Love", "Tweedle Dee", and "Rock Love". She also covered some country songs like "Jilted", "I Gotta Go Get My Baby", and "Let Me Go, Lover!".
In 1956 she had a two-sided hit with "A Tear Fell" and "Bo Weevil", covers of R&B songs. This was followed by "Sweet Old-Fashioned Girl." Also that year she co-wrote "I Love Mickey", about New York Yankees center fielder Mickey Mantle, who appeared on the record with Brewer. Another big hit in 1956 was Brewer's rendition "Mutual Admiration Society". Some of her songs have a decidedly pre-rock beat to them, especially "Ricochet", "Jilted", and "A Sweet Old Fashioned Girl".
In 1957 she made more covers: of country song "Teardrops in My Heart" and R&B songs "You Send Me" and "Empty Arms". The last chart hit of hers was "Milord" in 1961, an English language version of a song by Édith Piaf.
In 1962 she switched labels again, to Philips Records, where she recorded many singles and albums over a five year period, including Gold Country in 1966. She subsequently made a few recordings for other companies, but with no more big chart hits. In the 1970s she released a few albums on Flying Dutchman Records owned by her husband, jazz producer Bob Thiele.
Teresa Brewer remerged as a jazz vocalist on Thiele's Amsterdam label in the 1980's and 1990's recording a number of albums including tribute albums to Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. She also recorded with such jazz greats as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bobby Hackett.
Altogether, she recorded nearly 600 song titles. For her contribution to the recording industry, Teresa Brewer has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1708 Vine Street.
In 2007 Teresa Brewer was inducted into the Hit Parade Hall of Fame.
Death
The singer died on October 17, 2007, at her home in New Rochelle, New York, of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), a rare degenerative brain disease. She was 76.
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bobsmythhawk
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:25 am
Gorilla Remover
A man wakes up one morning to find a gorilla on his roof. So he looks in the yellow pages and sure enough, there's an ad for "Gorilla Removers". He calls the number, and the gorilla remover says he'll be over in 30 minutes.
The gorilla remover arrives, and gets out of his van. He's got a ladder, a baseball bat, a shotgun and a mean old pit bull.
"What are you going to do?" the homeowner asks.
"I'm going to put this ladder up against the roof, then I'm going to go up there and knock the gorilla off the roof with this baseball bat. When the gorilla falls off, the pit bull is trained to grab his testicles and not let go. The gorilla will then be subdued enough for me to put him in the cage in the back of the van."
So the guy puts the ladder up, gets the bat and the shotgun and walks towards the ladder. As he gets to the base of the ladder, he hands the shotgun to the homeowner.
"What's the shotgun for?" asks the homeowner.
"If the gorilla knocks me off the roof, shoot the dog!"
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Letty
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Wed 7 May, 2008 08:42 am
Thanks, Bob, for the great bio's, and your gorilla joke was hilarious. Reminds me of King Kong and ping pong.
Incidentally, I rollerskated to that tango at one time, but gave it up after I fell flat on my face. Lot easier on the dance floor. 
