The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin
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Название: The Times Great Lives
Автор: Anna Temkin
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780008164805
isbn:
Bogart was born in New York on June 23, 1899, the son of Dr Belmont Bogart, a physician, and his wife, who as Maud Humphrey had made a name for herself as a watercolour artist and commercial illustrator. He was educated at Trinity School, New York, and at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, whence he was destined to go to Yale, but this intention was not fulfilled. The United States had entered the First World War and Bogart joined the Navy. He had always been attracted to the theatre and as soon as the war ended he joined the staff of a promoter of theatrical ventures as manager of a travelling company. But he was determined to act and made his way to New York, where he made his first appearance in 1922 in Drifting.
Thereafter he appeared regularly in plays and it was not until 1930 that he went to Hollywood. Of his first efforts he himself later said they were ‘a flop’. He returned to the stage and it was only after the success of the play The Petrified Forest that he again turned to the screen, to make an immediate impact with the film of the play with Leslie Howard and Miss Bette Davis.
There followed many other films, and notable among his earlier successes was Dead End, in which Bogart played the part of a gangster; and a gangster on the screen he often was, but a gangster with a difference. If Mr Clark Gable may be said to stand in the parts he plays for the uninhibited American male, the happy extrovert whom every college boy would wish to be, the lad for the girls and the lad for the liquor, Bogart represented a contrasting, yet allied, type of American hero.
He dwelt in the shadows and was on the other side, so far as the police and the law were concerned, but that was because the police and the law were themselves often shown as corrupt. He was the masculine counterpart of the girl of easy virtue who has a heart of gold. Typical was the role he played in The Big Shot. Here he was, of course, the ‘big shot’, the head of a gang which took beatings-up and murder in its stride, and yet at the end he gave himself up rather than see an innocent man, a man he did not even know, electrocuted. It is, of course, wildly improbable that the ‘big shot’ would do any such thing and, to make the climax convincing, some powerful acting would seem necessary. But that was not Bogart’s way. ‘He has charm and he doesn’t waste energy pretending to act,’ wrote James Agate. ‘He has a sinister-rueful countenance which acts for him. He has an exciting personality and lets it do the work.’
Certainly Bogart seemed to do little more than project his film personality on to the screen and leave it at that, but it was astonishing how much he could convey with a suggestion of pathos in that husky voice of his, with a shadow of a smile wryly turned against himself, and in films which gave him a chance, a film, for instance, such as John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he showed that his acting could be positive even though it never moved far away from the essential Bogart.
Bogart appeared in a great number of films, among them High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Across the Pacific, The African Queen, To Have and Have Not, Casablanca, and The Caine Mutiny, and, while other reputations waxed and waned, he went on unchanged and unchangeable in calm, complete command of himself, the situation and the screen. He had what Kent found in Lear – authority.
Arturo Toscanini
A legendary musical figure
16 January 1957
Signor Arturo Toscanini, who died in New York yesterday at the age of 89, was the most renowned of living conductors, since his reputation was internationally supreme. His pre-eminence was recognized in Italy, where he was born, in America, where he worked for the greater part of his career, and in German countries, where between the wars he conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.
His quality as an interpreter was mainly known in this country from gramophone records, but his visits to London in the 1930s and in 1952 confirmed and amplified the judgment that for clarity of presentation and fidelity to the composer he had no peer. His tastes were catholic but his interpretations were always those of an Italian. Yet Siegfried Wagner made him the mainstay of the Bayreuth Festival in 1930 and 1931, and the connection was broken only by Toscanini’s refusal to appear in Germany when Jewish musicians were maltreated by the Nazi Government. That he should thus be accepted by the leading institution which stands above all others for German music is certainly a remarkable testimony to the universality of his art. It was also a characteristic fulfilment of Toscanini’s career. For he had been the first to introduce Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to Italians; he had supervised the international repertory at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1898 to 1915; and it is on his performances of Beethoven’s symphonies that his popular fame is founded.
In this country our opportunities of hearing him in the flesh were limited to a short series of concerts in each of the years 1930, 1935, 1937–39, and a last visit in 1952, and, though we heard no opera under his direction, his performances of choral works, including Beethoven’s Mass in D and Choral Symphony, Brahms’s Requiem, and Verdi’s Requiem were memorable. It was widely claimed for him that his readings of these and other classics revealed them in their true character as their creators conceived them, if not for the first time, certainly in a definitive manner. The listener hearing some hitherto over-looked detail in a familiar symphony, noting some subtlety of tonal gradation or shaping of a phrase, was surprised to find that it was all marked in the score, which in point of fact the conductor never used either at rehearsal or at performances by virtue of his prodigious and, as it seems, photographic memory. Yet his interpretations were no more final than those of any other executant musician, and critics whose admiration was less idolatrous found the defects of his qualities in his reading of German music.
Beethoven’s Symphonies
The Latin mind, like the Mediterranean sunshine which conditions it, views things with hard edges, clear outlines, and thorough-going logic. Toscanini’s meticulous attention to detail in Beethoven’s symphonies made them classical and brilliant but ultimately a little inhuman. The opening chords of the Eroica sounded, at any rate with the virtuoso orchestras of America, more like pistol shots than an announcement of the key of E flat, and his bourgeois German Mastersingers became a procession of Florentine nobles. This is only to say that he was true to himself, and no conductor of more single-minded integrity ever lived. This sterling honesty brought him into conflict with the Fascist Government, whose song ‘Giovinezza’ he refused to play, as it also caused him later to break with Nazi-dominated Germany. To show with an unmistakable gesture what he thought of their intolerance he went to Palestine and conducted the newly formed Jewish orchestra in its national home.
Born at Parma on March 25, 1867, he began his musical studies at the local conservatoire, where his principal subject was the cello. Attention was first called to his exceptional abilities by his remarkable memory, which enabled him after a few rehearsals to play his part in the orchestra without opening the copy on his desk. His opportunity came when, at Rio de Janeiro in 1886, he was called by a sudden emergency to leave his place among the cellos and conduct Aida, which he did by heart. From that beginning he went on to the Metropolitan in New York, where he was chief conductor from 1898 to 1915. In 1922 he returned to La Scala at Milan, where he had previously worked between 1898 and 1908, and when the theatre was reopened after alterations in 1922 he was appointed director and ruled it like the autocrat he was.
Encores Abolished
Of new works, such as the eagerly expected performance of Boito’s Nerone and the premiere of Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, he refused to announce even the dates until he was satisfied that the productions were ready, in complete disregard of the convenience of those who were prepared to come СКАЧАТЬ