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applsauss · 4 years ago

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Östliche Helden | I

Description: Your grin is unabashed when you hear him shouting after you.

Fandom: Hetalia

 Pairing: Human!Prussia (Gilbert Beilschmidt)/Reader

Word Count: 4k+

Warning(s): None.

Unsere Freundschaft mit der Sowjet-Union erzwingt den Frieden.

The words are printed on a sun-bleached poster featuring two working class men, one holding the red and gold banner of the Soviet Union, the other with a German flag with three stripes: one black, one red, one yellow.

“Our friendship with the Soviet Union enforces peace,” you whisper to yourself. Staring at the smiling men, trying to read into their expressions, you pick at the peeling corners of the poster, then try to smooth them down.

Behind you, through the window, the sky is aglow with a strong orange and dusty red that fades into pink. You’ve wasted the afternoon in an abandoned factory, with the small, portable radio Gilbert spent a fortune on tuned to a western station. The announcer is saying something about a concert, but you don’t hear him. The sun is setting. The wind drags its fingers through the trees.

Gilbert is sitting in the window, with one leg bent at the knee and propped up on the window sill, the other dangling against the outside of the building. He’s reading a book your brother gave to you about Frederick II, the greatest king of Prussia. You could never sit through it, but Gilbert hasn’t been able to put it down for the last two weeks.

You hum lightly to yourself as a different, tinny voice advertises some household cleaning product, and continue to observe your boyfriend. His brow is furrowed in focus, eyes scanning each page with intent, and his platinum hair is painted red by the blazing sun buzzing behind him. You can’t help but stare at him, and then past him.

The view from the window is framed by Gilbert’s body, and then by large, dark trees that inhale and exhale with the breeze. Behind the trees is a demolished industrial block, rubble left where it fell at the foot of the wall--then past that is the Berlin Wall, itself: nearly four meters tall, two thick, and with various layers of increasingly horrible deterrents running the length of the death strip. It is a grisly sight.

Behind that though, lies true innovation and freedom. Sunlight bounces off the windows of pristine West Berlin as if to say Look! Look at what is here. Look at Germans like you--but not--as they live with American autos, French wine, and Italian designer bags.

The radio announcer’s voice cuts off, and then the guitar chords of the next song fade in, plucking at all of your drifting thoughts and drawing them back tight again. It is a song of freedom, the western stations like playing it because they know it can be heard even behind the Iron Curtain. You close your eyes and let the music take you away, swaying in rhythm.

“I, I will be king,

And you, you will be queen.

Though nothing will drive them away,

We can beat them, just for one day,

We can be heroes, just for one day.”

You never listen to western radio in your house. It is silent except for when your father listens to a concert performance, or when your brother used to practice piano in the sitting room. Besides, your mother is frighteningly aware of the ears in the walls, and your father makes a point of socialising with people he suspects of being connected to the Stasi--probably in hopes of being recruited. It’s why you’ve been left alone, even after your Onkel took bolt cutters to the chain-link border fence at the Austrian-Hungarian border.

You hear your shoes scrape on the floor as you step side to side, getting more into the song, nodding your head and then you hear Gilbert snicker under his breath. You peak your eyes open to find him watching you. His book is closed, resting on the window sill, and he’s now sitting with his legs inside the building. You stop dancing, laugh, but the music continues on without you, the sound like an afterthought calling to you.

Gilbert leans forward, watching you with steady eyes, then pushes off the window sill to stand. He tilts his head for a moment, like he’s appraising the music, then begins to snap his fingers on beat, tapping his foot and bobbing his head.

You join him, shimmying, waggling your eyebrows and he snorts, then gets more into the song, shaking his hips and dramatically reaching up towards the ceiling, then closing his fist and dragging it down in front of him like the disco stars on TV.

Trying to upstage him, you click your heels together and start to do the twist, but the song’s chords are drawn out, and so the shuffling you’re doing is more for comedic effect than anything else.

You pause when you’re closest to the ground, then jerk your head up to catch Gilbert’s eyes in challenge. He lets out a breathy laugh, then changes tactics. Not one to be outdone, he throws his arms above his head and begins thrusting his hips in time with the drums, while training his expression to remain serious, smoldering, almost. You laugh.

“And you, you can be mean,

And I, I'll drink all the time,”

“ 'Cause we're lovers, and that is a fact,” he mouths the words dramatically, then winks and blows you a kiss, making you snicker again. “Yes, we're lovers, and that is that.”

Still thrusting his hips, he begins to make little hops towards you, dust from the floor kicking up around his feet. Grinning, you rise back up to both feet and meet him halfway, swinging your arms and stepping in time with the beat.

When you finally meet each other, he reaches forward, smooshing your face between his hands, then ducks down to plant a silly, solid kiss to your lips. Your teeth clack, your nose presses hard into his cheek, and he laughs into your mouth, then quiets when you kiss him back.

The music becomes less of something you hear, and more of something you feel thrumming in your heart, thrumming in Gilbert’s as it beats beneath your palm, and thrumming in the way you both sway side to side, caught up in the moment.

“Though nothing will keep us together,

We can steal time, just for one day.”

Gilbert sucks in a breath through his nose, kissing you earnestly, sincerely now, then pulls back slowly. His hands are cupping your face, thumb gently rubbing your cheek, and you’re humbled by the expression on his face, still painted in increasingly soft shades of red-pink. Affection blooms in your chest, warm like a candle, and spreads until you forget about the bite of the approaching evening. Almost overwhelmed, you pull his arms around you and lay your forehead on his shoulder, watching the West as the sun dips farther towards the horizon, as the sky begins to bleed the same red, the same damn Sowjetisch Rot, that paints their bloody flag.

You can hear him smiling in the way he breathes, feel it in the way he settles the weight of his arm over your shoulders and presses his face into your hair. You forget about school, you forget about the stress of your parents’ disapproval of Gilbert, of you, you forget about the future and you forget about the gottverdammte West. “Lieb’ dich, Liebchen,” he whispers into your hair.

The intimacy scares you. You think about pinching the soft fat on his stomach and twisting like you would a bottlecap to relieve some of the carbonated tension that’s filled the space, the tender moment buzzing around the two of you, surrounding you with its quiet intensity. The sudden thought makes you laugh, and you settle farther into his embrace instead, letting yourself sink into this feeling despite the fear for once. “Lieb’ dich, doch. You’re my favourite, you know.”

You somehow both see it coming and are taken by complete surprise when he pinches the meat of your arm and twists enough for it to smart.

“Ow-a!” You shove him off you and he stumbles back over a piece of broken furniture, snickering. You huff, dust your pants off, and try to glare at him, but you can’t bring yourself to be all that annoyed. Afterall, you chose this place and you chose him.

And the sun continues to set.

***

The morning is grey outside the apartment. It’s still early enough for the streetlamps to be on, and from under your bedroom door, you can tell the hallway light is on as well. You hear the muted clamor of breakfast coming from the kitchen, and your father coughs.

You smooth your hair back in the vanity one more time, double-checking your appearance, then grab your backpack and head out into the hall.

“You came home late last night,” your father comments from the dinner table as soon as you enter the sitting room. In front of him sits an empty plate, a mug of coffee and a half-empty glass of orange juice.

You set your bag on the table and head into the kitchen. “I know.”

“You shouldn’t ride your bike at night,” he calls after you.

“I know.”

Your mother is by the stove, wearing her sunflower print apron and black slippers. The room smells like breakfast sausage. She has her back turned to you and when you approach, she spins on her heel and pushes a full plate into your empty hands before you can do anything else.

“Ah--Guten Morgen, Muti. Vielen--” you’re caught half-way through a yawn--“Dank.”

“Good Morning, Liebling. Eat up.”

You smile and return to the table. Your father is waiting, but says nothing. He continues to say nothing as the clouds are pushed across the sky and the food on your plate disappears one bite at a time.

Eventually, he grows tired of the silence. He takes a long sip of his coffee, then says, “You were out with that boy, weren’t you.” It is not a question.

“You know his name,” you say mildly as you push your chair back and stand to take your plate into the kitchen. Your mother appears at your elbow and collects it for you instead. Without another excuse, you pull your bag across the table to check if you have everything you’ll need for school.

Still sitting where he is, your father asks, “When are you going to break up with him?”

“I’m not.”

He gives you a hard look. You pull your arms through the straps of your bag. “Is there really no one else for you?”

“I’m going to class now.”

He sighs, seemingly giving up on the conversation. “You have work after, right?”

“Right.”

Another sigh. “Alright. Be safe. See you soon.”

He drains the last of his coffee. Your mother kisses you on the cheek and tells you to have a good day as well.

“You, too. Lieb’ dich.” You turn to your father, “Bye, Vati. See you soon.”

***

Childhoods are not made equal, and the law of even-stevens is not something adults seem overly interested in. You first learned this in year three, when you were dropped off by your mother to play with a friend who lived in an apartment the size of your living room. Her bed was folded up neatly under the coffee table and the bathroom was two floors below hers. When you explained all this to your parents, they never allowed you back.

The second time you learned that adults were not as worried about being fair as they pretended to be was at Gilbert’s house, when the two of you could only play cards on his bed because his newborn brother was sleeping and anything else would have woken him. His mother made you sandwiches and when you asked about her lunch, she said she wasn’t hungry, then ate the discarded crust off your bread.

The third was when Gilbert was visiting your house, and switched on your family’s brand-new color television set. He casually flipped through the channels until he found one you’d never seen before, and you watched with confusion as image after image of the glamorous, rich, free West Germany flashed on the screen--something you’d never seen before, something he thought of as common knowledge, and something that made you begin to question what else was hidden from you. Your father catching the two of you soaking in the perverse capitalist propaganda movie ‘Grease’ was the beginning of his long-lasting feud with Your-Best-Friend-Gilbert.

The list goes on and on, your eyes not so much being opened to a single dawning realisation--but rather that realisation was inevitable, a full picture fed to you piece by piece each time you bore witness to some other lie fed to East Germans, who chew and chew and swallow because they’re so starved of everything else.

This is what you’re thinking about as Kristian goes on explaining Nietzsche to you. It’s terribly pretentious, he’s terribly pretentious, and so, regretfully, terribly, are you.

“I thought it was interesting. Didn’t you as well? What Herr Ullman was saying about the difference between Nietzsche’s master and slave morality--obviously we are the strong masters. We must not be pitied.”

Kristian is a person who never for a second thinks for, or critically, of himself. He is in your Philosophy lecture, your father knows his, and he has never once wanted for anything. The urge to fidget overcomes you, and so you grip the underside of the shop-counter, and rock back and forth on your heels to stop the annoyance from crawling up your arms.

“Y/N?”

“Hmm?”

“I asked what you thought of how Nietzsche’s ideas could be applied to our politics now.”

“Oh, well--” you pause for a moment to think about how much of yourself you’re willing to put into this conversation-- “It’s interesting how some people claim to be masters--”

“Of course!” he interrupts. “You’re brilliant--because in reality, they are not. Take here, in the DDR, for example. The majority of the working class think of themselves as masters, while holding slave moralities,” he finishes for you, incorrectly. You bite your tongue.

Sometimes, Kristian is enjoyable to be around because it’s like a game, to have a conversation with someone who refuses to hear anything you say. You like to test the limits of his perception of you and see just how far he’ll go to rationalise whatever you say so that in his head, you agree with him.

Recently though, it’s become clear that he has an interest in you that is just a little more than friendly, and casually letting him down is becoming a problem because he refuses to take a hint. Now, at Uni, every time you turn a corner, he’s there to follow you to your next class, and his forwardness is beginning to unroot whatever amusement you used to feel around him.

Kristian is another item to add to the growing list of reasons you’d rather be wasting your day watching the clouds go by than be at Uni--or be trapped behind the counter of the Apotheke you work at, begging the powers that be that Kristian leaves before your shift is up, otherwise he might get it in his head that you have free time to spend with him.

Time moves in slow motion as Kristian stands in front of the register and continues to talk. No one has come in after him so you don’t have any excuses to leave the conversation. You feel awkward, like being alone with him is a mistake that you can’t escape from because the owner of the Apotheke is out taking his lunch in the park across the street.

“We think so alike, you and I…” Kristian trails off, and then he fiddles with the soda he bought ten minutes ago, and looks away, embarrassed. “Hey,” he begins again, and at the tone of his voice, your stomach drops. Before he was just dropping hints or loosely suggesting the idea of going on a date, but this is a confrontation that you’re not prepared to deal with. “I was wondering if sometime you’d like to--”

The bell above the door trills, and you jump into action. “Ah--Willkommen! How can I help you today?” you speak loud enough to smother the end of Kristian’s question.

“Liebe,” you hear the customer say, and immediately you know that it is Gilbert. What timing! He’d taken the morning off to go see Ludy’s school play and mentioned that he might be able to swing by after running a few errands for his mother. “You’ll never guess what happened! Oh! Kristian--” he pauses-- “Hallo. Anyways, I was riding my bike down Schulstrasse after the play and I--”

“We were talking,” Kristian interrupts, whatever boyish shyness he’d had evaporating as he crosses his arms and turns to face Gilbert, almost puffing out his chest like a bird.

Gilbert gives him a funny look, then asks, “yea?” He looks to you for confirmation.

You shoot Gilbert a wobbly, unconfident smile and gesture to Kristian with wide eyes. He furrows his brow in confusion, then looks around and realizes you’re alone in the shop. He then turns his full attention to Kristian and, with fake pleasantness, asks, “how are your classes, Kristian?”

Kristian rocks back on his heels and unfolds his arm at the sudden question. “Good, I guess…” He shoots a look back at you, and you pretend to be seriously inspecting the cash register for defects. You pop open the drawer and feign counting the Deutsche Marks.

“Good!” Gilbert presses forward. “I hear Herr Ullman is a hardhead.”

“A bit,” Kristian replies, then turns his back to Gilbert and tries one last time to get your attention. “Y/N--”

At the sound of your name leaving Kristian’s mouth, Gilbert slides an arm on the counter between you and Kristian, who bites off the rest of his response and drops all pretenses to glare at Gilbert.

“Interesting,” Gilbert says flatly, “Sowieso, Schatz, when does Herr Friedman get back from his lunch?”

Kristian doesn’t wait for your response. He just huffs, snatches his drink off the counter, and stalks out of the Apotheke. The bell trills as he pulls the door open, then lets it slam shut in its frame.

“Tschussi!” Gilbert calls after him, and you really should reprimand him for that last, unnecessary taunt, but the amount of relief you feel now that Kristian is gone is ridiculous, and so you reach over the counter to grip his forearm with both hands, grinning up at him.

“Don’t be so mean,” you say half-heartedly.

Gilbert cocks his head to the side. “Then he should take a hint and listen when you tell him no.”

His genuine response surprises you when it shouldn’t. Afterall, you know what sort of man he is; you’ve known for years. It’s what kindled your crush on him in secondary school, the year before he went off for his apprenticeship in that garage he still dreams of, it’s what fanned the flames when he returned for his year of mandatory service, and it’s what stokes the love even now. “Thank you.”

“Why?” He grins. “Did you think it was awesomely sexy when I made him back off--”

You choke on a laugh, cheeks warm. “Oh, shut it! You ruin everything!”

He laughs like a witch’s cackle, and you pretend to be put out, then ask,“what were you trying to tell me about before?”

“Oh!” He straightens. “Remember that pigeon from school?”

***

“Gib can talk to birds, you know,” Ludwig says factually. ‘Gib’ is his childhood nickname for Gilbert. You nearly trip at the sudden change in topic.

“See!” Gilbert throws a hand out to gesture at Ludwig, vindicated. His other hand holds his bike steady as the three of you continue to walk down the sidewalk.

You groan. “I swear to god, the pigeon does not know you!”

“Yes he does! I’ve named him--”

“Don’t remind me--”

“His name is Gilbird.” Gilbert proudly sticks his nose up, and you resign yourself to pushing your bike in silence. You’ve had this same dispute since school. Gilbert is convinced that since he saved a pigeon from a hungry alleycat one time, it now owes him some sort of life debt, or at least he thinks the pigeon thinks that.

“I think it’s clever,” Ludwig says quietly, squeezing the straps of his backpack tighter in his hands as he continues to walk beside you and Gilbert, who are pushing your bikes to keep pace with him.

“Ludy,” you stage whisper just loud enough so Gilbert can still hear you, like you’re sharing some grave secret, “he’s been saying the same thing since year five. I don’t even think it’s the same bird!”

“Schatz!” Gilbert cries, outraged.

You roll your eyes dramatically. “C’mon,” you say, and goad Ludwig into jogging ahead of Gilbert with you. As much as Ludwig hero-worships his elder brother, he also can’t resist the temptation of teasing him, especially when you offer him the upper hand.

“Ah!” Gilbert exclaims once he realizes your plan. “Hey!” When you pass him, you stick your foot out to unhinge his kickstand, making him stumble over his bike.

“I’m too awesome to not be telling the truth!” he calls after you. “You were there! Hey!”

Ludwig laughs out loud, and so you turn around as well, only to see Gilbert struggling to untangle his handlebars from a bush. “Quickly!”

You swing your leg over the seat of your bike, then usher Ludwig into the basket fixed over the rear wheel. It’s not meant for a person and is an uncomfortable fit, even for little Ludy, but the two of you manage.

“That’s cheating!” Gilbert calls out sorely, still a little ways behind the two of you, though you know he’ll catch up in no time. Ludwig giggles right in your ear, and then you push off the concrete and begin pedaling down the sidewalk.

“Look at him, all the way back there,” Ludwig teases.

You can’t turn around to bask in your victory, you’re afraid to lose balance and throw Ludwig off the bike. “Is he still stuck?”

“Yes--No! He’s just freed himself! Schneller! Faster!” Ludwig leans more of his weight forward, onto your back, and you laugh breathlessly, then pedal harder. You take the curb hard, pushing yourself off the seat to absorb the shock of your front wheel dropping onto the asphalt, then the rear wheel squeaks in protest under Ludwig’s added weight.

From around the wide bend of the road, you see the young trees that are planted in front of Gilbert and Ludwig’s Plattenbau, the tall apartment building looming over the road like a victory line. Your thighs begin to burn under the exercise. You pant, and Ludwig squeezes your shoulders tighter. “Oh no!” he cries.

Then it’s over. “Ha ha!” Gilbert tuts victoriously as he flies past the two of you, legs stuck out in a silly pose as his gears rapidly click.

“Aw! That’s no fair, Gib! Y/N has me on the bike, too!” Ludwig defends you from over your shoulder.

“You should have thought about that before you two unawesomely conspired to push me into that bush!”

“We didn’t push you! You tripped!” You slow to a stop in front of the side entrance next to Gilbert, and wobble under yours and Ludwig’s combined weight. Gilbert drops his bike in the grass and moves to help Ludwig down from his perch on the basket.

Gilbert rolls his eyes. “Same thing.” He sets Ludwig on the ground, then adds with fake scorn, “cheaters.”

Ludwig laughs, and you inspect your backpack, which Ludwig had been crouched on for the duration of the short ride. “Do you go to work now, Gib?” he asks.

“Ja. But I’ll be back like normal.” You look up in time to see Gilbert messing with Ludwig’s hair. You feel a pang of jealousy, thinking of your own brothers.

“Okay.” Ludwig walks to the entrance, then pulls open the door. “See you later!”

“Bye!”

“Bye, Luddy!”

For a moment, the two of you just breathe the filthy air. This part of town always stinks like a car’s exhaust pipe. Then Gilbert looks back at you. “Race you to your house?”

You eye him critically for a moment, then turn your bike around and begin pedaling as fast as you can without so much as waiting for a fair start.

Your grin is unabashed when you hear him shouting after you.

***

Translations:

Unsere Freundschaft mit der Sowjet-Union erzwingt den Frieden. Our friendship with the Soviet Union enforces peace. From this 1979 propaganda poster.

Deutsche Demokratische Republik. DDR. German Democratic Republic. Abbreviated ‘GDR’ in english. The official name of ‘East Germany’.

Onkel. Uncle.

Sowjetisch Rot. Soviet Red, referring to the Soviet Union’s flag colour.

Gottverdammte. Goddamn (f).

Lieb’ dich. Love you (slang, not proper grammar).

Liebchen. Sweetheart, lovely (noun). Term of endearment. (Literally: little love, love I am fond of, the -chen is diminutive and cute).

Doch. Too, totally, all the same, nevertheless. This is a ridiculous german word.

O-Saft. Orange Juice (slang).

Guten Morgen. Good morning

Muti. Mom.

Vielen Dank. Thank you very much.

Liebling. See Liebchen, though this is a more common version.

Vati. Dad.

Apotheke. Drug store, pharmacy.

Willkommen. Welcome.

Liebe. Love.

Hallo. Hello, Hi.

Deutsche Marks. Mark der DDR. Currency of the GDR.

Sowieso. Anyways.

Schatz. Babe, baby. Term of endearment. (Literally: Treasure)

Tschussi. Bye-bye, toodles. Cute with children, though usually used sarcastically by adults, especially men. (Gilbert is making fun of Kristian here)

Schneller! Faster!

Plattenbau. A cheap style of building made from prefabricated concrete slabs common in the GDR. (Literally: Panel building)

Masterlist | Posting Schedule

#hetalia #aph #aph prussia #hetalia x reader #aph prussia x reader #aph prussia imagine #hetalia imagine #aph imagine #aph x reader

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hughxhoward · 3 years ago

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Goodness, HUGH HOWARD has arrived in London. HE is 30, of the EFFINGHAM HOWARDS. Though they are RETURNED to the Season, we can only describe them as PASSIONATE and WITTY, dear reader. Accompanied by his CAT WELLINGTON , they have settled in and are accepting social calls. But be warned: they are known for their CAPRICIOUS BEHAVIOUR. (Kate, 25, She/her, EST)

THE BASICS

Name: Hugh Thomas James Howard

Nicknames: Hughie - His mother

Meaning of her name: German: Meaning Soul, mind & Intellect.

Age: 30

Birthday: January 8th, 1770

Relationship Status: Unmarried

Sexuality: Biromantic/pansexual

Height: 5"9

Physical features: Thick brown beard, piercing blue eyes, a deep tan.

A BRIEF LOOK

Alignment: True Neutral

MBTI: ENFJ - The Protagonist

Ennegram:

Hobbies: Writing, going on long walks, making candles from scratch with essential herbs.

Favourite Food: A heart roast made by his mother

Inspiration: Collin Bridgerton, George Whickham, Heathcliff, William Shakespeare.

BIOGRAPHY

Hugh was born the one and only surviving child of Thomas Howard and Olivia Howard (Nee Jamison). They were the ‘poor’ relation, and that fact alone was something that was driven into Hugh from a young age. Though their family name held greatness, he was nothing but a paupers son, and though there was enough money to send him to school, there was not much else in the way of funds. Hugh never had a close relationship with his father, who he found to be too ‘head in the clouds’ when it came to ideas of what grandeur they could live in. His father was always planning, attempting to move onto the newest innovation to make some money.

When Hugh was 6, he awoke one morning to his parents arguing. His father was leaving for the American Frontier and leaving his wife and son to struggle at home. That was a turning point in Hugh’s life, as he watched his mother’s world shatter around her.

He stayed in school until they could no longer afford it, and quickly went to work.

Hugh however, was a man of the world born in a working class mans body. He was not one for hard labour, though he would do it to put food on the table. His true passion, the one that kept him up at all hours of the night, and had him falling asleep on the job was poetry. Poetry was his solace, and the one thing perhaps, that he was talented at.

The fact that as he grew, his devotion to spoken word began to expand, and his lack of wanting to work diminished caused a war within Hugh for some time. He had turned into a version of his father. The one who he always criticized for leaving his family.

It wasn’t until he was 22 that he got his ‘proverbial’ big break. Somehow, it had come to light that he was talented with words and it became a sort of side business for Hugh to write sonnets and love poems for the men he met at a local pub.

Once he started making money off of his work, going to a labour intensive job was not something that he desired to do, and since he was charging enough for his poems, he realized that he could live a suitable life on his own. The only problem was his mother.

It was not the best of conversations, bringing up the fact that he wanted to leave, just as his father had, on search for himself. Yet somehow, it seemed his mother had expected it, and had decided to move from the tiny home they shared, and in with her sister. It allowed Hugh to go off and explore the world, make himself happy, and enabled him to send money home for his mother every once in awhile, knowing that she was being well taken care of.

His adventures and travels found him in Istanbul, wandering spice markets and staying out late with all sorts of new friends. He wrote about the Black Sea, his adventures in cramped caravans and even wrote about love he found - but never dared to publish it. His adventures ranged from magnificent, to dangerous and to downright sordid. Though, he did not write of his sordid affairs.

Years passed, and while Hugh longed to continue adventuring, a letter from his mother called him back home. At the ripe age of 29, his mother had beckoned him back, urging him to finally settle and make a name for himself in England.

He had missed his mother, and despite wishing to continue his travels, knew that she had a point. He owed it to her to come back home, as his father never had.

There were times when Hugh wondered if his father was still alive. Sitting on a porch somewhere with a new family and name. With riches just sitting there that he could have shared with Hugh and his mother. Thoughts like that seemed to ruin his day, so Hugh deigned not allow such horrid thoughts to creep in.

Landing on English soil was a bittersweet thing. He had seemed to miss the broody atmosphere that England possessed, and despite looking out of place thanks to his tan skin and lightened hair,

Now back ‘home; his mother has begged him to present himself to his ‘distant’ cousin, the Earl of Effingham as his one heir - at least until the young wife he has produces a son.

It is a tricky business, but Hugh has come with a mission, and a promise to his mother.

YO GUYS! Hugh’s connections can be found HERE i’m so excited to bring him to you all!

#theseason; task #intro #long bio is long

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bertrumstrousers · 3 years ago

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hello my children it is time for

Bad Blood

Chapter II: Still There

Bertrum completed his evening ritual with a final splash of warm water to rinse the soap from his face and a gentle drying off with a neatly folded washcloth. He shook out his hair and used a damp thumb and forefinger to tidy his mustache as he scrutinized his reflection. If he was going to face Mr. Drew in the coming days, he was going to do it presentably.

“Ya ain’t goin’ on a date, Bertrum, what’re you fussing over your appearance for?” Lacie barked from the adjacent bedroom. “C’mon, it’s late.” Her eyes were rolled behind the book she was reading as she awaited him in bed.

With an audible sigh, Bertrum returned to her side. “Elegance starts with proper hygiene, and you know how highly I value elegance.” As he plucked his nightcap from the dresser and sat upon the edge of the bed to put it on, he couldn’t help but quip, “…and that is why you’re here.” Had Lacie been watching, she would have caught sight of a soft smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Listen to yerself bein’ all sappy.” Lacie set her book upon the bedside table as she chuckled. “Cute.”, she murmured as she sank deeper under the duvet.

“I’m not lying, love.” Bertrum laid down beside her and gestured with one hand as though to silently ask, ‘May I hold you?’, to which Lacie nodded in approval. Bertrum responded by wrapping a husky arm around the small of her back and tenderly pulling her over. A quick tug on the lamp’s pull chain allowed comforting darkness to fall over the room.

With one hand resting on Bertrum’s forearm, the other held snug in his large hand and her head tucked neatly under his chin, Lacie asked, out of pure curiosity, “…so what’s we doin’ tomorrow, exactly?”

A sharp tightening of Bertrum’s chest made her regret the query. “Would you prefer the long answer or the short one?”

“Whichever’s gonna upset ya less.”

“They’re both equally infuriating.”

“…aight. In that case, sleep first, be mad later.”

Bertrum agreed with a quiet grunt before giving Lacie a nuzzle and kiss on the neck in lieu of “good night”.

Lacie’s near-silent breathing was the only thing that kept Bertrum grounded in reality. By the time he resigned himself to a sleepless night nearly an hour later, she had buried her face in his nightgown, draped one arm across his stomach and the hand that previously occupied his now empty palm rested at her side. She was clearly at peace beside him.

It made him jealous.

His envy was only tempered by the sudden desire to keep her uninvolved while he settled his score with Joey. This was, after all, his own axe to grind. Bertrum was not about to admit his insecurity to himself, but a nagging thought repeated in his mind.

‘I’m plenty capable of standing up to the man, but I need someone in my corner. Someone to prove that I own what he stole credit for, to back me up when I show him my paten—‘

Startled by the revelation, Bertrum nearly leapt from his bed.

He had proof, and it would save Lacie the trip.

Waking up in the middle of the night was not common for Lacie, and if she did, it meant something was amiss. Bertrum hogging the blankets was her first thought, but that night, when she rolled over to reclaim the pilfered bedding, she found her partner missing.

“…Bertrum?”

Had it not been for his outburst that evening, she wouldn’t have thought much of his disappearance. An occasional midnight snack or pot of tea was not unusual, but he was rarely gone for long.

No noise came from the kitchen. Bertrum was a plenty polite man but he certainly was not a quiet one. Soft humming to himself as he waited for the kettle to boil, clinking utensils as he stirred his tea and the sharp tap of ceramic against ceramic as he raided one of his many biscuit tins were all sounds that were normally present during his nighttime visits to the kitchen, but every one was absent. When a full twenty minutes passed without his return, Lacie grew increasingly concerned, and the silence only made it worse.

She slid off the bed, draped on her bathrobe and went searching for him.

From the study, Bertrum silently and repeatedly thanked Lacie for leaving the crossword on the side table. By chance, the part of it that listed several of the attractions had been on the reverse of the very article that prompted his fit of rage that evening, and as much as the words still made his blood boil, he needed it.

Every ride and every innovation that was mentioned in that scrap of newspaper had a story. Hours upon hours of research, calculations and drafting. Once the technical parts had been perfected, Bertrum bestowed his favorite part, the creative and elaborate embellishments, upon his creations. A massive locked filing cabinet kept the attractions’ stories safe. The documentation that accompanied inventions that took a firm hold in the amusement park industry included their respective patents.

Those were what Bertrum was after.

For nearly half an hour, Bertrum leafed through his filing cabinet, using the article to guide his selections. His prized rides. The side-friction roller coaster, made in collaboration with a late German ride mechanic with whom he’d shared the patent. His inverted steel hairpin coaster; he had never been one for wooden coasters, their frailty did not allow for the wild drops or gravitational forces that had become increasingly popular among younger patrons. After fetching the ones the article contained, Bertrum started pulling papers associated with rides that had become famous. It hadn’t been mentioned in the article, but the strange contraption he’d invented, lovingly called the Whipper-Will-O, had its patent added to the expanding stack in his briefcase. It had always been one of his personal favorites. After all, the more disorienting, the better.

Bertrum had just entered the final stretch of his search when a knock at the door jarred him from his reminiscing and angry brooding. “Bertrum, what the hell’re you doin’ at this hour?!”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“…so yer… packin’.”

“Yes. Go back to bed, love—I’ll be there once I’m done getting these patents together.” Bertrum hadn’t turned his head to acknowledge her at all.

Bertrum had at some point changed from his nightgown to a collared shirt, neat slacks and, though the light of the desk lamp by which he worked was dim, she was pretty sure she could see his suspenders hanging from his waist. Clearly he didn’t intend to return to bed. “Big guy, just…” She sighed. “Come back t’bed. It’s three AM and I ain’t gonna coddle ya if you’re cranky in the morning.”

“Just give me some time.”

An irritated Lacie tucked her finger into the back of his collar and tugged. “You can do this after we hit the bookin’ office.”

Bertrum answered her with a grunt as he slid out of his chair. “Fine, fine.”

Attempting to sleep was more taxing than Bertrum expected. His mind was full of a sick fog that demanded his attention and blocked his path to rest. Too exhausted from fighting it, he let the haze take over.

‘He used to call you in at random. It began innocently enough, just… simple requests. You could handle those, they were nothing new. Clients made them all the time. But those requests turned into demands. Obnoxious demands. You should have listened to Mr. Connor when he warned you that Mr. Drew was unreasonable. You should have known, Bertrum. You should have bloody known.’

‘You could have left. On your own terms. The contract he’d written was a hastily scrawled mess of a page. All it said was that you’d do it, nothing more, and through that inebriated haze you could barely think twice about whether to put down your name… your untarnished name.’

The insecurity made him sick.

‘…No. Stop it. This was not your fault. That sleaze, he… he tricked you. He took advantage of you. You’re a professional, Piedmont. He was not. It showed that day. That day he called you into his office and threw you out.’

‘That memo you sent Joey was supposed to put out any fire that was smoldering between you. He overreacted. All it said was to stop taking and not returning your blueprints. Nothing else. So what if you raised your voice?! He started this! He was in your office after hours. He was mucking about in your proprietary work, and you called him out. You had every right! His firing you over an accusation? That was his fault.’

‘Tomorrow… will be better.’

Bertrum finally was able to talk himself down.

‘You’ll take back your plans by force, if you must. You cannot let Mr. Drew keep what isn’t his, and you certainly cannot let him implement anything more of yours under his own name.’

#batim #bendy #bendy and the ink machine #bertrum piedmont #joey drew #thomas connor #lacie benton #headcanon #bertrum x lacie #lacie x bertrum #batim au #batim bad blood au #fanfic #the giandark writes #is this a disaster idk bertrum throwing a mental tantrum is hilarious #i feel like i rambled #but bert is very babbly so #swearing tw

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introvertguide · 3 years ago

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Influential Directors of the Silent Film Era

Upon hearing that I am a fan of silent era film, people will ask if I have a favorite actor or movie from the time period. However, when I am asked about my favorites from other fans of silent film, it tends to involve my favorite director. This is because silent film actors had to over gesticulate and performed in an unrealistic way and could not use their tone or words to convey emotion. The directors also did not have a way to review as they shot and would have to use editing skills and strategic cover shots to make sure that everything was done properly and come out the way they imagined it. It was up to the director to be creative and they were forced to be innovative and create ways to convey their vision. Luckily for many average or poor directors of the time, audiences were easily impressed. However, today's more demanding and sophisticated audiences can look back at some of the genius behind the films of silent era Hollywood.

Alice Guy-Blache: Matrimony's Speed Limit (1913) and The Fairy of the Cabbages (1896)

Art director of the film studio The Solax Company, the largest pre-Hollywood movie studio, and camera operator for the France based Gaumont Studio headed up by Louis Lemiere, this woman was a director before any kind of gender expectations were even established. She was a pioneer of the use of audio recordings in conjunction with images and the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filming. Guy-Blanche didn't just record an image but used editing and juxtaposition to reveal a story behind the moving pictures. In 1914, when Hollywood studios hired almost exclusively upper class white men as directors, she famously said that there was nothing involved in the staging of a movie that a woman could not do just as easily as a man.

Charlie Chaplin: The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1923), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940)

It is unfortunate that many people today think of Chaplin as silly or for screwball comedy when, in fact, he was a great satirist of the time. He created his comedy through the eyes of the lower economic class that suffered indignities over which they had no control. He traversed the world as his "Tramp" character who found his fortune by being amiable and lucky. The idea that a good attitude and a turn of luck could result in happiness was all that many Americans had during the World Wars and the Great Depression. He played the part of the sad clown and he was eventually kicked out of the country for poking fun at American society. Today he is beloved for his work, but he was more infamous than famous during a large part of his life.

Buster Keaton: Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), and The Cameraman (1928).

That man that performed the most dangerous of stunts with a deadpan expression, Buster Keaton was a great actor, athlete, stuntman, writer, producer, and director. It is amazing that you could get so much emotion out of a silent actor who does not emote, but Keaton managed to do it. He was also never afraid to go big, often putting his own well being at risk to capture a good shot. Not as well known for his cinematography or editing as many of the other directors of the time, he instead captured performances that were amazing no matter how they were filmed. Famous stunts include the side of a house falling down around him, standing on the front of a moving train, sitting on the side rail of a moving train, and grabbing on to a speeding car with one hand to hitch a ride. If you like films by Jackie Chan, know that he models his films after the work of Buster Keaton: high action and high comedy.

Cecil B. Demille: The Cheat (1915), Male and Female (1919), and The Ten Commandments (1923)

Known as the father of the Hollywood motion picture industry, Demille was the first director to make a real box office hit. He is likely best known for making The Ten Commandments in 1923 and then remaking it again in 1956. If not that, he was also known for his scandalous dramas that depicted women in the nude. This was pre-Code silent film so the rules about what could be shown had not been established. Demille made 30 large production successful films in the silent era and was the most famous director of the time which gave him a lot of freedom. His trademarks were Roman orgies, battles with large wild animals, and large bath scenes. His films are not what most modern film watchers think of when they are considering silent films. That famous quote from the movie Sunset Boulevard in 1950 in which the fading silent actress says "All right, Mr. Demille. I'm ready for my close-up," is referring to this director.

D.W. Griffith: Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)

Griffith started making films in 1908 and put out just about everything that he recorded. He made 482 films between 1908 and 1914, although most of these were shorts. His most famous film today is absolutely Birth of a Nation and it is one of the most outlandishly racist films of the time. The depiction of black Americans as evil and the Klu Klux Klan as heroes who are protecting the nation didn't even really go over well at that time. Some believe that his follow up the next year called Intolerance was an apology, but the film actually addresses religious and class intolerance and avoids the topic of racism. At the time, Griffith films were known for the massive sets and casts of thousands of extras, but today he is known for his racist social commentary.

Sergei Eisenstein: Battleship Potemkin (1925)

This eccentric Russian director was a pioneer of film theory and the use of montage to show the passage of time. His reputation at the time would probably be similar to Tim Burton or maybe David Lynch. He had a very specific strange style that made his films different from any others. The film Battleship Potemkin is considered to be one of the best movies of all time as rated by Sight and Sound, and generally considered as a great experimental film that found fame in Hollywood as well as Russia.

F.W. Murnau: Nosferatu (1922), Faust (1926), and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

I think that most people would know the bald-headed long-nailed vampire Nosferatu that was a silent era phenomena. It was so iconic that the German film studio that produced the movie was sued by the estate of Bram Stoker and had to close. Faust was his last big budget German film and has an iconic shot of the demon Mephisto raining plague down on a town that was the inspiration for the Demon Mountain in Fantasia (1940). Also, Sunrise is considered one of the best movies of all time by the AFI and by Sight and Sound as well as my favorite silent film. Fun facts: 1) more of Murnau's films have been lost then are still watchable and 2) he died in a car wreck at only 40 when he hired a car to drive up the California coast and the driver was only 14.

Erich von Stroheim: Greed (1924)

Maker of very strange German Expressionist films, Stroheim films are often listed as Horror or Mystery even though he considered himself a dramatic film maker. His most famous movie Greed was supposed to be amazing with an 8 hour run time but it was cut drastically to the point that it makes no sense and was both critically and publicly panned when an extremely abridged version was released in the U.S. Over half the film was lost and a complete version no longer exists. Besides this film, Stroheim was even better known for being the butler in the film Sunset Boulevard as a former director who retired to be with an aging silent film star. He also made a movie called Between Two Women (1937) that told the story of a female burn victim that was inspired by the story of his wife being burned in an explosion in a shop on the actual Sunset Boulevard.

Victor Fleming: The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone With the Wind (1939)

Although not known for his silent films, Fleming did get his start during the silent era. He was a cinematographer for D.W. Griffith and then Fleming directed his first film in 1919. Most of his silent films were swashbuckling action movies with Douglas Fairbanks or formulaic westerns. He is the only director to have two films on the AFI top 10 and they happened to have come out the same year.

Hal Roach: Lonesome Luke films starring Harold Lloyd, Our Gang shorts, Laurel and Hardy shorts, and Of Mice and Men (1939)

It is not really fair to put Hal Roach in the silent era directors because he was influential at the time but he had a 75 year career. He was a producer and film studio head and even had a studio named after himself. His biggest contribution to the silent era was his production of Harold Lloyd short comedies and he continued to produce films in the early talkies including Laurel and Hardy shorts, Our Gang shorts, and Wil Rogers films. Roach was the inspiration for the film Sullivan's Travels, in which a famous director who only did frivolous comedies goes out into the world to find inspiration to find a serious drama. Roach did direct a single serious drama, Of Mice and Men, but it came out in 1939 and was buried underneath the works of Victor Fleming. The wealthy cigar smoking studio head that many people think of when they picture a film studio suit is based on this guy. The man would not quit and stayed in the business into his 90s and lived to the ripe old age of 100.

#directors #silent films #old Hollywood #1920s #introvert #introverts #influential

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kacicka777 · 5 years ago

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simSbiotic´s guide

ICONIC DESIGN

I offer you selection of my favourite design pieces created during the 20th century that are considered icons of modern era at the same time. They are not only a part of the permanent collections of world´s the most leading design and decorative art museums but thanks to their timeless appearance they are still the best ingredient of many high-end modern interiors.

And maybe this list may seems as cliché I try to bring to you a context that proves the most of the best designs were revolutionary, visionary and innovative at that times and pushed the boundaries not only for design and furniture industry but for everyday simple life.

And that´s what matters.

Pavli

1. Vitra - Eames House Bird, around 1910 ♥ / ♥ / ♥

The bird was originally carved by Charles Perdew around 1910 as a bird decoy for hunters and became popular in the 1950s, primarily for its minimal shape and dark color. It was popularized by Charles and Ray Eames, who acquired one on their travels in the Appalachian mountains and soon can be seen in many of their product photo-shoots.

2. Arne E. Jacobsen - Ant chair, 1952

3. Pierre Jeanneret - Office chair for Chandigarh, 1955-1956

4. Charles and Ray Eames - Rocking Armchair Rod (RAR), 1948

Large family of Plastic chairs are the most well-known designs by Eames. Designer couple won second prize with them in the 'International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design', organised by the New York Museum of Modern Art. They used a fiberglass, a material that was entirely new to the furniture industry and at that time reserved for the US Army.

5. Charles and Ray Eames - Dining Armchair Rod (DAR), 1948

6. Charles and Ray Eames - Lounge Chair and Ottoman, 1956

7. Charles and Ray Eames - Dining Armchair Wood (DAW), 1948

And also another type of Plastic chair - Dining Side Wood (DSW), 1948.

8. Warren Platner - Platner Arm Chair, 1966

Not limiting itself to architecture, Warren Platner also experimented in furniture design. In the 1960s, as the modernist movement became more expressive, Platner focused on a quieter aesthetic, wishing to create more graceful structures. The Platner Collection captured the decorative, gentle shapes and is now considered a design icon of the modern era.

9. Charles and Ray Eames - Eames Lounge Chair Wood (LCW), 1945

In 1999, Time magazine declared the LCW the greatest design of the 20th century. The original LCW was a result of designing plywood splints for the US air force. After several experiments Eames came up with an “honest” ergonomic chair that was soon coveted the world over.

10. Vico Magistretti - Atollo lamp, 1977

This object of Industrial design by Italian designer Vico Magistretti for O luce won the 1979 Compasso d’Oro award and took its place in the permanent collections of design and decorative art museums as MoMA, becoming so much more than just a lamp: an icon.

11. Eero Saarinen - Tulip chairs and Pedestal tables, 1955-1956 ♥

The collection was designed by Eero Saarinen for the Knoll company of New York City. The furniture with its smooth lines of modernism and experimental materials is considered a classic of industrial design.

12. Hans J. Wegner - CH24 | WISHBONE CHAIR, 1949

The very first model that Hans J. Wegner designed exclusively for Carl Hansen & Søn.

13. Jorgen Hovelskov - Harp Chair, 1968

14. Poul Henningsen - Artichoke Lamp, 1958

The iconic lamp was designed for a commision for a restaurant in Copenhagen. The fact that the light source couldn’t be seen was very revolutionary at the time. When people didn’t see a lamp as a nice object but simply as a generator of light, Henningsen was one of the first to think of both.

15. Jean Prouvé - Standard chair, 1934 ♥

During World War II, Prouvé was a member of the French Resistance, and his first post-war efforts were devoted to designing metal pre-fab housing for those left homeless by the conflict. The Standard Chair exemplifies a fundamental aspect of Prouvé’s furniture design: his unwavering focus on structural requirements.

16. Marco Zanuso - Lady armchair, 1951

Designed in 1951 for Arflex, the Lady armchair won the gold medal at the IX Milan Triennale in the same year. The armchair brings innovation to the traditional manufacturing technique for making armchairs and sofas, with each part manufactured separately and then assembled.

17. Verner Panton - Panton chair, 1960-1967

S-shaped chair is the world's first moulded plastic chair and it is considered to be one of the masterpieces of Danish design.

18. Arne Jacobsen - Cylinda-Line, 1967

Arne Jacobsen hoped that Cylinda-line products would enrich the lives of average consumers with industrial design that was functional and affordable. It won the Danish Design Council’s ID Prize in 1967.

19. anknown designer - Acapulco chair, around 1950 ♥

The designer remains unknown to this day. The story goes that while visiting Acapulco in the 50s, a French tourist was uncomfortably hot sitting in a solidly-constructed chair in the Mexican sunshine. Inspired by the open string construction of traditional Mayan hammocks nearby, he designed a chair fit for the modern tropics.

20. Harry Bertoia - Bertoia Diamond Chair, 1952

Bertoia found sublime grace in an industrial material, elevating it beyond its normal utility into a work of art.

21. Hans J Wegner - PP701 Chair, 1965 ♥

22. Alvar Aalto - Table 915 for Artek, 1932

23. Anna Castelli Ferrieri - Componibili storage unit, 1969

The Componibili storage unit by Kartell is a design classic that is a part of the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris.

24. Charles and Ray Eames - Molded Plywood Lounge Chairs with Metal Bases (LCM), 1946

25. Serge Mouille - Serge Mouille sconces, 1958

Serge Mouille was asked by Jacques Adnet, the director of the French Arts Company, to create 'big lightings' for his South-American customers. Mouille imagined then the famous Standing lamp 3 arms and Standing lamp one arm that was the beginning of the « Formes Noires » collection.

26. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - Barcelona chair, 1929

In 1929, Mies was commissioned by the German government to design the German pavilion for the Barcelona Fair, one of the most elegant pieces of architecture ever created. This building required furniture that simply did not exist, so Mies responded to this commission with the Barcelona chair.

27. A. Bonet, J. Kurchan and J. Ferrari Hardoy - The butterfly chair, also known as a BKF chair, 1938 ♥

The BKF chair (the initials of its creators) was developed for an apartment in Buenos Aires. In 1940, a picture of the chair appeared in the US Retailing Daily, where it was described as a "newly invented Argentine easy-chair for siesta sitting", few months later, the chair was awarded and attracted the attention of the MoMA in New York immediately.

28. Arne Jacobsen - Drop chair, 1958

Arne Jacobsen designed his Drop chair exclusively for the legendary SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, along with the Swan and the Egg chair. The Drop chair was Arne Jacobsen’s own favourite piece.

29. Bonderup & Thorup - Semi pendant light, Gubi 1968

30. Morgens Lasse - Kubus 4 candle holder, 1962 ♥

31. Marcel Breuer - The Wassily Chair, 1925-1926

While the head of the cabinet-making workshop at the Bauhaus in Germany, Breuer revolutionized the modern interior with his tubular-steel furniture, inspired by bicycle construction. His first designs, including the Wassily, remain among the most identifiable icons of the modern furniture movement.

#sims 2 custom content #sims 2 download #ts2 #simSbiotic´s guide #simblr

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dweemeister · 4 years ago

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Movie Odyssey Retrospective

Fantasia (1940)

With production on Bambi postponed, Walt Disney dedicated himself to Pinocchio (1940) and a film featuring animated segments accompanying classical music. Walt’s demands for innovation saw Pinocchio’s budget skyrocket, and the film left Walt Disney Productions (today called Walt Disney Animation Studios) on unstable financial grounds. This laid impossible financial expectations for the latter film – tentatively entitled The Concert Feature – to meet. War halted the possibility of cross-Atlantic distribution as Walt continued to emphasize innovation for each of his features and workplace tensions rose among his animators. What was planned as a glorified Mickey Mouse short set to Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Mickey’s popularity was flagging by the mid-1930s, trailing other Disney counterparts and Fleischer Studios/Paramount’s Popeye the Sailor – grew to include seven other segments. The film that became known as Fantasia remains the studio’s most audacious work. Though it built off the visual precedents of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the volume of artistry for artistry’s sake contained in Fantasia, eighty years later, remains unsurpassed.

After the Philadelphia Orchestra’s conductor/music director Leopold Stokowski offered to record The Sorcerer’s Apprentice for free (he did so with a collection of Hollywood musicians; the English-Polish conductor, a rare conductor who spurned the baton, was among the best of his day), cost overruns on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice led to its expansion as a feature. To provide commentary as Fantasia’s Master of Ceremonies, the studio sought composer and music critic Deems Taylor – who came to Disney and Stokowski’s attention in his role as intermission commentator for radio broadcasts of New York Philharmonic concerts. But both Disney and Stokowski were too busy during the summer of 1938 to brief Taylor on their plans. Stokowski spent that summer in Europe seeking permission for the rights to use certain pieces from various composers’ families (this included visits to Claude Debussy’s widow and Maurice Ravel’s brother); Disney was occupied with the construction of the Burbank studio. After Stokowski returned from Europe in September, Disney asked Taylor to come to Los Angeles to formally discuss Fantasia. Taylor agreed, arriving one day after Stokowski and Disney began their meetings, staying in Southern California for a month.

Over several weeks that September, Disney, Stokowski, and Taylor made the final selections for pieces – suggested by story directors Joe Grant and Dick Huemer (both worked on 1941’s Dumbo and 1951’s Alice in Wonderland) – to be featured in Fantasia. Hours were spent listening to classical music recordings, followed by brainstorming potential visualizations. The meetings were recorded by stenographers, with transcripts (housed at the Walt Disney Archives in Burbank) provided to all three participants. During these meetings, Walt mostly listened to Stokowski and Taylor consider every suggestion by Grant and Huemer:

DISNEY: Look, I really don’t know beans about music. TAYLOR: That’s all right, Walt. When I first started, I thought Bach wrote love stuff – like Romeo and Juliet. You know, I thought maybe Toccata was in love with Fugue.

During these meetings, an admiring Walt – in addition to gifting a potential last hurrah for Mickey Mouse and to create a film unrestrained by commercial demands – realized he wanted to create a gateway to classical music for those who might not otherwise give such music a chance. Always leading his writing staff in developing stories, Walt felt relieved that he could share this responsibility with Stokowski and Taylor. Free of the storytelling stresses plaguing the Pinocchio and Bambi productions at the time, these tripartite meetings were not beholden to narrative cohesion, allowing the participants to suggest anything that their imaginations conjured. Without the constraints of narrative logic or predictions about what an audience wanted to see, Fantasia became the center of Walt Disney’s passion until its completion.

Nine selections were made by the trio, with one piece later being dropped entirely (Gabriel Pierné’s Cydalise and the Satyr) and another being replaced after its completion. A completed segment for Debussy’s Clair de Lune* was substituted out for Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (the mythological scenario Walt envisioned for the Pierné reverted to the Beethoven, but more on this later). Over the next few years, Disney’s animators would complete the artwork; Stokowski would study, arrange, and record the selections with the Philadelphia Orchestra (except for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which had already been recorded); Taylor would write his introductions to be filmed at the Disney studios.

In almost all of cinema, music accompanies and strengthens dramatic or comedic visuals. Fantasia is the reverse of this relationship. The animation provides greater emotional power to the music – an arrangement that may be startling to viewers unfamiliar with or disinclined to classical music or cinematic abstraction. Fantasia’s opening scenes and piece introductions feature the affable Taylor, who outlines the film’s conceits:

TAYLOR: Now there are three kinds of music on this Fantasia program. First, there’s the kind that tells a definite story. Then there’s the kind that, while it has no specific plot, does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. And then there’s a third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake.

That last kind, also known as “absolute music”, opens Fantasia with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, an organ piece arranged for orchestra (“Toccata” and “Fugue” refer to the musical forms of the piece’s two halves). As James Wong Howe’s (1934’s The Thin Man, 1963’s Hud) gorgeous live-action cinematography of the orchestra (the Toccata) transitions to animation (the Fugue), the audience witnesses Walt Disney Animation’s first, and arguably only, foray into abstract animation – as opposed to abstract stylizations to bolster a macro-narrative – for a feature film. The Toccata and Fugue is a pure visualization of listening to music, as if the animation was improvised. The sequence involves, among other things, string instrument bridges and bows flying in indeterminate space, figures and lines rolling across the screen, and beams of light and obscured shapes timed to Bach’s piece. In these opening minutes, Fantasia announces itself as a bold hybrid of artistic expression in atypical fashion for Disney’s animators.

Next is The Nutcracker Suite by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, which is subdivided into six dances (“Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”, “Chinese Dance”, “Arabian Dance”, “Trepak”, “Dance of the Reed Flutes”, “Waltz of the Flowers” – these dances are placed out of order, and the “Miniature Overture” and “Marche” which open the suite are not present). Disney, Stokowski, and Taylor made this selection decades before Tchaikovsky’s now-most famous ballet became a Christmas cliché in the United States – it was barely performed in the early twentieth century and is usually regarded, among classical music experts and by the composer himself, as a lesser Tchaikovsky ballet.

History aside, this animated treatment of The Nutcracker utilizes an astonishing array of different animation techniques across all six dances. With The Nutcracker, the Disney animators, for the first time, take a piece with a preexisting story, animate sequences adhering to the music’s essence, yet producing images that have nothing to do with the original material. In Fantasia, The Nutcracker remains a ballet – the sugar plum fairies, racially insensitive mushrooms, fish, and flowers move as if they are on a ballet stage. But there is nothing, in the sense of a narrative through line, to connect all six dances. Set to the changing of the seasons, The Nutcracker contains gorgeously-animated fairies and intricate fish (Cleo from Pinocchio was a testing run for the “Arabian Dance”), climaxing with fractal flurries that look like an antique Christmas card brought to life. Even the racist “Chinese Dance” exemplifies masterful character design – simplicity does not preclude expressiveness. The Nutcracker’s spectacular inclusion improved Tchaikovsky’s standing and his least acclaimed ballet among casual classical music fans.

Based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem of the same, Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice ushers in the Mickey Mouse short that overshadows all others. With the animators’ adaptation closely following Goethe’s poem, Dukas’ original piece is impossible to listen to without imagining Mickey, rogue anthropomorphic broomsticks, and thousands of gallons of water. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice marked the cinematic debut of Mickey Mouse with pupils, as designed by Fred Moore (the dwarfs on Snow White, the mermaids in 1953’s Peter Pan) – Mickey was first drawn with pupils on a program to an infamous, booze-filled party Walt Disney threw in 1938. With pupils, Mickey’s gaze provides a sense of direction that black ovals make ambiguous. The additional personality – not to say Mickey Mouse’s original character design lacked personality – thanks to the pupils strengthens Mickey’s expressions of jollity, shock, submissiveness. A lanky, stern sorcerer is Mickey’s brilliant foil. Their physical differences and reactions imbue The Sorcerer’s Apprentice with a troublemaking charm recalling Mickey’s earliest short films, sans the slapstick that defined those appearances. These decisions heralded a new era for how the Walt Disney Studios’ mascot would be animated and portrayed in his upcoming shorts.

This segment’s chiaroscuro sets a pensive atmosphere, enclosing Mickey in a black and brown gloom as he – a nominal apprentice – is tasked with menial duties, not magic. The indefinite shape of the sorcerer’s chambers owes to German Expressionism (as does the penultimate piece in Fantasia), with its impossibly curved angles and architectural fantasy hiding secrets that no sorcerer’s apprentice assigned to carry buckets of water could understand. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice tonal shifts always feel justified, rooted in the sequence’s character and production design – although, in this regard, the sequence is surpassed later in Fantasia.

Immediately following a mutual congratulations between Mickey (voiced by Disney) and Stokowski is Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s brief one-act ballet/piece debuted in 1913 to an audience riot because of its musical radicalism – The Rite of Spring liberally partakes in polytonality (using two or more key signatures simultaneously), polyrhythms, constant meter changes, unorthodox accenting of offbeats, chromaticism, and piercing dissonance. Concert hall attendees had heard nothing like The Rite of Spring before and, even in 1940, Stravinsky’s composition divided audiences. The Rite of Spring – precipitating the concert hall’s philosophical battles of the late twentieth and twenty-first century over whether melody and coherent rhythm still has a role to play in contemporary classical music – is a gutsy choice to present to general audiences.

At fifty-eight years old when Fantasia was released, the Russian-born, French-naturalized (and soon-to-be American citizen) Stravinsky is the only composer to have lived to see one of his pieces adapted for a Fantasia movie. Stravinsky despised Stokowski’s interpretation and cutting of his music (all musical cuts were Stokowski’s decisions, reasoning that an audience of classical music neophytes might not be comfortable in a theater for too long during Fantasia), but applauded the animated interpretation of his work. As a ballet, The Rite of Spring is about primitivism. The Disney animators sheared the piece of its human element to liberate themselves from the ballet’s narrative (and believers of creationism). Instead of portraying primitive humans, they elected to depict an account of Earth’s early natural history – its primeval violence, the beginning of life, the reign and extinction of the dinosaurs. Astronomer Edwin Hubble, English biologist Julian Huxley, and paleontologist Barnum Brown served as scientific consultants on The Rite of Spring, imparting to the animators the most widely-accepted theories within their respective scientific fields at the time.

As the camera moves towards the young Earth, Stravinsky’s piece clangs with orchestral hits emboldened by the volcanic violence on-screen – the animated flow of the lava and realistic bubble effects (studied by the animators using high-speed photography on oatmeal, mud, and coffee bubbles inflated by air hoses) are technical masterstrokes. Giving way to single-celled organisms and later the dinosaurs, the camera’s perspective keeps low, emphasizing the height of these prehistoric creatures. The suggestion of weight to the dinosaurs distinguish them from comic, cartoonish depictions in American animation up to that point. The Rite of Spring is the only Fantasia segment where I can imagine viewers unversed in classical music, but making an honest attempt to appreciate the music, being repelled for the entire passage because of the music itself. Otherwise, so ends Fantasia’s immaculate first half.

After the intermission, we meet the Soundtrack, a visual representation of the standard optical soundtrack, with Deems Taylor. It is an entertaining diversion before Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (“The Pastoral Symphony”) – accompanied by scenes of winged horses, centaurs, pans, and gods from classical mythology. These characters and backgrounds, and clear story were intended for Pierné’s Cydalise and the Satyr before its deletion from the program. Seeking a replacement piece, Disney chose Beethoven’s Pastoral over Stokowski’s objections. Stokowski, who largely dismissed potential criticisms from diehard classical music fans and encouraged Walt’s experimentation in their meetings, noted that Symphony No. 6 – the unidentical twin of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5; both were composed simultaneously and debuted to the public on the same evening in 1808 – was Beethoven’s tribute to the Viennese countryside and that, according to Beethoven’s program notes from that 1808 concert, represented, “more an expression of feeling than painting.” Beethoven’s long summer walks amid babbling brooks, verdant forests, and wildlife provided solace from his increasing deafness. Deems Taylor, acknowledging Stokowski’s citations of the symphony’s history, thought the decision a brilliant one. By simple majority, Walt’s repurposed idea for the mythological setting for the Pastoral was produced.

For the entirety of the Pastoral’s second movement, we see cupids assisting in centaur courtship. These hackneyed scenes are glacially paced, overly dependent on Fred Moore’s risqué good girl art. Fantasia’s most objectionable content also appears in the second movement in the form of crude racial caricatures of black women – though the worst example will almost certainly not be in any available modern print of Fantasia, as the Walt Disney Company has consistently cut the footage and essentially denies it ever existed. The story’s tone almost trivializes Beethoven’s Pastoral, making the seond movement a tiresome Silly Symphony. Arguably the weakest of the original Fantasia numbers (Stokowski’s criticisms justified by the final product), the Pastoral nevertheless contains an eye-catching palate of color that makes it unmissable. Encouraged by the supervising animators on the Pastoral to use as much color as possible, the throngs of artists assigned to this were up to the task. Rarely does Technicolor, in full saturation, look brighter than when the young flying horses take to the sky, centaurs and centaurettes partake in mating rituals, and an ever-inebriated Bacchus stumbles into the centaurs’ party.

From the closing ballet of Act III of Amilcare Ponichelli’s opera La Gioconda, the Dance of the Hours is the penultimate piece in Fantasia. Dance of the Hours suffers from its placement in the film. After Bacchus’ simpleminded, jolly antics in the Pastoral, this whole segment is the one that most resembles Disney’s Silly Symphony short films. Presented as a comic ballet with ostriches, elephants, hippopotamuses, and alligators, the Dance of the Hours has the ideal supervising animators assigned to it – caricaturist “T.” (Thornton) Hee and Pluto/Big Bad Wolf animator Norm Ferguson. Dancer Marge Champion (the model for Snow White’s dancing), ballerina Tatiana Riabouchinska and her husband David Lichine served as models for the balletic motions, endowing the segment with choreographic – though perhaps not biological – accuracy. As long as the viewer basks in the Dance of the Hours’ unadulterated silliness and does not mind the fact it is the least innovative piece in terms of its animation, it is an enjoyable several minutes of Fantasia.

Fantasia concludes with a staggering pairing: Modest Mussorgsky’s‡ tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (partial cuts) and Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria (with English lyrics). After an inconsistent second half to Fantasia, the film ends with two selections so remarkably contrasting in musical form and texture and animation. Night on Bald Mountain, like Dance of the Hours, is the responsibility of an ideal supervising animator in Wilfred Jackson (1937’s The Old Mill, Alice in Wonderland) and one of the finest character animators in Bill Tytla (Stromboli in Pinocchio, Dumbo in Dumbo). Using Mussorgsky’s written descriptions for the piece, the animators closely adhere to the composer’s imagined narrative. On Walpurgisnacht, a towering demon atop a mountain unfurls his wings and summons an infernal procession from the earthly and watery graves below. This demon, the Slavic deity Chernabog, is Tytla’s greatest triumph as a character animator and for all animated cinema. With movements modeled by Béla Lugosi of Dracula (1931) fame – one could not ask for a better model – and Jackson himself, Tytla captures Chernabog’s enormity, the torso’s muscular details, and graceful arm and hand movements that never falter frame-by-frame. Chernabog moves more realistically than any Disney character – in shorts and features, Rotoscoped or not – and would retain that distinction until the advent of computerized animation. In Tytla’s mastery, one forgets that Chernabog is nothing but dark paints.

Jackson’s use of contrasting styles to demarcate Chernabog from the ghosts and spirits summoned to the mountain’s summit further contributes to Night on Bald Mountain’s satanic atmosphere. The shades answering Chernabog’s call appear as either rough white pencil sketches that one might expect in a concept drawing or translucent, wavy figures animated with rippling effects that required a curved tin to complete. That rippling, wafting effect – lasting only several seconds in Night on Bald Mountain – was among the most labor-intensive parts of Fantasia, requiring animators to be present at work in multiple shifts across twenty-four hours to photograph the movements for each frame. The Walt Disney Animation Studios would not delve into such darkness again until The Black Cauldron (1985).

Night on Bald Mountain benefits from being followed immediately – without a Deems Taylor introduction (he introduces both pieces prior to the Mussorgsky) – by Schubert’s Ave Maria, and vice versa. As Chernabog and the spirits romp, an Angelus bell tolls just before the dawn, signalling the end of their nocturnal merriment. Stokowski arranged Night on Bald Mountain’s final bars to fade away as a vocalizing chorus precedes the beginning of the Ave Maria. Where Night on Bald Mountain incorporated numerous styles in a disorderly frolic, the Ave Maria is rigid and structured by design (the camera only moves horizontally from left to right or zooms forward). In twos, robed monks walk through a forest bearing torches – their figures obscured behind trees, their reflections gleaming in the water. As the camera zooms forward for the first time, darkness envelops the screen. Using English lyrics by Rachel Field that do not adapt Schubert’s German lyrics, soprano Julietta Novis sings the final stanza of the Ave Maria (Field’s first two stanzas were unused) as the multiplane camera gradually glides through a still bower. The Ave Maria features some of the smallest individually-animated pieces (the monks) ever brought to screen. And with the multiplane camera (when the monks are onscreen, the multiplane camera – which was created to provide depth to animated backgrounds – is utilized, for the first time in its existence, to evoke flatness), it also contains what may be the longest uncut sequence in animation history.

The Ave Maria’s beauty sharpens the contrast between itself and Night on Bald Mountain – the sacred and the profane. Their spiritual and musical pairing is cinematic transcendence. Yet, the Ave Maria was almost cut entirely from the film at the last moment, as it was spliced into the final cut four hours before Fantasia’s world premiere – all thanks to an earthquake that struck Southern California a few days earlier. How fortunate for those worked on the segment, the preceding Night on Bald Mountain, for Fantasia, and cinema that the Ave Maria was included in the end.

Some of the pieces considered by Disney, Stokowski, and Taylor that did not make the final cut appeared in Fantasia 2000 – most notably Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite (1919 version), which Walt initially preferred over The Rite of Spring until convinced by Taylor otherwise. In contrast to his company’s contemporary attitude, Walt Disney himself was disapproving towards proposing sequels, with Fantasia proving the only exception. Walt imagined sequels to Fantasia to be released every several years, with newer Fantasia sequences starring alongside one or two reruns. Other pieces Disney, Stokowski, and Taylor (who wrote additional introductions in anticipation of future Fantasia films; I am looking into whether these introductions still exist) contemplated remain unadapted as Fantasia segments. The notes and preliminary sketches of some of these proposed segments – including a fascinating consideration to adapt selections from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (the Ring cycle) to J.R.R. Tolkien’s then-newly-published children’s book The Hobbit – most likely reside in the Walt Disney Archives for reference if and when the company’s executives approve a third Fantasia movie.

Walt Disney’s dream of Fantasia sequels was quickly dashed. His proposal to add Fantasound – the studio’s prototypical variant of a stereo sound system – proved extravagantly expensive for all but a dozen movie theaters in the United States. Released as a roadshow (a limited national tour of major American cities followed by a general release), the inflated ticket prices due to the roadshow’s Fantasound system harmed Fantasia’s box office. Though a vast majority of film critics and some within classical music circles hailed Fantasia, the vocal and vehement division was inescapable. Some cultural and film critics, citing solely that Walt Disney had bothered to touch classical music, castigated Walt and Fantasia as pretentious (classical music’s negative reputation of being dated, inaccessible, and snobby was not nearly as widespread in the 1940s as it is today; musical appreciation and education has receded in the U.S. in the last several decades). Intransigent classical music purists – usually noting Stokowski’s frequent cutting of the music – lambasted Fantasia as debasing the compositions (I dislike Stokowski’s cutting, certain stretches of the Bach and Stravinsky recordings, and much of the Pastoral’s story, but this is a reactionary overreach). The negativity from both spheres stole the headlines, eroding interest from North American audiences. With the European box office non-existent, Pinocchio and Fantasia stood no chance of turning a profit on their initial releases. Their combined commercial failure sent the studio in a financial tailspin – a crisis that a comparatively low-budget Dumbo single-handedly averted.

Rankled by the criticism directed towards Fantasia, Walt Disney’s anger turned inwards, fostering a personal and corporate disdain of intellectuals that marked the rest of his career. One sees it in his irritation towards critics decrying the handling of race in Song of the South (1946); it is also there in his dismissive treatment of P.L. Travers over an adaptation of her novel Mary Poppins.

Mounting tension among Disney’s animators over credits, favoritism towards veteran animators over the studio’s pay scale and workplace amenities, the announcement of future layoffs due to the studio’s financial crisis, the unionization of animators at all of Disney’s rival studios, and Walt’s political naïveté in heeding the words of Gunther Lessing (the studio’s anti-communist legal counsel) threatened to explode into public view. On May 28, 1941, unionized Disney animators began what is known – and downplayed to this day by the Walt Disney Company – as the Disney animators’ strike. The strike, which lasted for two months, shredded friendships between strikers and non-strikers. Walt Disney, who surveyed the striking animators and filed away names in his deep memory, is said to have repeatedly referred to the strikers as, “commie sons of bitches”. More than once at the studio’s entrance, Walt slammed on his car’s accelerator towards the strikers and hit the brakes before making contact.

Under pressure from lenders, Walt recognized the union in late July but nevertheless fired numerous striking (and non-striking) animators in the months afterwards. Many of those terminated by Disney joined cross-Hollywood rivals or founded the upstart United Productions of America (UPA; Mr. Magoo series, 1962’s Gay Purr-ee). An embittered Walt would never again feel the sense of family among his studio’s staff as he did in the 1920s and ‘30s at the Hyperion studio, despite his public persona and statements to the contrary.

A wonder of filmmaking, Fantasia arrived in movie theaters as Disney’s Golden Age began to fracture. If not for war or Walt Disney’s obstinance, this era might have lasted longer. In the decades since, the contemptuous responses to Fantasia from classical music elites have cooled – for classical music lovers with not nearly as much institutional power, Fantasia has indeed become a beloved gateway into the genre. Its irrepressible beauty, invention, and bravery as a visual concert cannot be overstated.

My rating: 10/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating.

This is the sixteenth Movie Odyssey Retrospective. Movie Odyssey Retrospectives are reviews on films I had seen in their entirety before this blog’s creation or films I failed to give a full-length write-up to following the blog’s creation. Previous Retrospectives include The Wizard of Oz (1939), Dumbo (1941), and Godzilla (1954).

For more of my reviews, check out the “My Movie Odyssey” tag on my blog.

* The completed Clair de Lune segment was re-edited and integrated into Make Mine Music (1946).

‡ Mussorgsky’s original score for Night on Bald Mountain – which was not performed again during his lifetime following the piece’s premiere – went missing after his death in 1881. In 1886, fellow composer and colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, controversially began editing Mussorgsky’s partially missing scores using his “musical conscience” (including the opera Boris Godunov). Rimsky-Korsakov wanted to preserve and retain his colleague’s music among aficionados of Russian classical music. The version of Night on Bald Mountain heard in Fantasia is Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement of the piece. Mussorgsky’s original score to Night on Bald Mountain was found in 1968, but the Rimsky-Korsakov arrangement is more frequently performed today.

#Fantasia #Walt Disney #Leopold Stokowski #Deems Taylor #Mickey Mouse #Philadelphia Orchestra #Joe Grant #Dick Huemer #James Wong Howe #Fred Moore #T. Hee #Norm Ferguson #Wilfred Jackson #Bill Tytla #My Movie Odyssey

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archinform · 4 years ago

Text

The theater that never was

Max Reinhardt Theatre, proposed, New York City

1927-1929

Joseph Urban, Architect

Joseph Urban (1872-1933) c. 1915, architect, illustrator, and scenic designer

Joseph Urban cut his artistic teeth in fin-de-siecle Vienna, amid the city’s neo-baroque splendor and a maelstrom of artistic activity. He would be influenced by symbolism, art nouveau, the Vienna Secession, and the first stirrings of modernism in the capital. In New York, he would design a showroom for the display and sale of Wiener Werkstatte objects. He would serve as principal scenic designer for both the Metropolitan Opera and the Ziegfeld Follies. In his time, he was so famous that, when he checked into a hospital during his illness in the early 1930s, he would use an assumed name.

Among Urban’s unrealized projects, a new home for the Metropolitan Opera and a theater for director and impresario Max Reinhardt offered tantalizing glimpses of artistic and theatrical possibility. Due to the Depression, his project for Reinhardt’s theater never came to fruition. However, another theater project, the Ziegfeld Theatre (1927) in Manhattan, showed his unconventional design concepts, which included surrounding the audience with a painted environment, the world’s largest mural. His Reinhardt Theatre would have featured the world’s tallest proscenium, and would have expanded the stage area around the sides of the auditorium, merging audience and actors.

Few of Urban’s architectural works remain today. His archives, housed at Columbia University, help to preserve the artistic genius of a designer and artist who had become little-known. The Joseph Urban Collection online showcases and provides a guide to this collection.

Urban straddled two worlds: architecture and theater. On the one hand, there was an innate theatricality to Urban's architecture – theatrical in the sense of being dramatic and playful, and theatrically conceived as virtual stage settings in which real people are characters moving through carefully designed spaces.

Aronson, Arnold, “Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban.”

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/architectOfDreams/text.html#theater

Joseph Urban Archives, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/

For theater buildings in New York, wedged into narrow spots on crowded streets, Urban felt there was a particular challenge that could be met through designing the public face of the building "around the electric light sign and incidentally the fire–escape and the marquee." The proposed Max Reinhardt Theatre… intended for the productions of the innovative German director but unfortunately never built, was perhaps the epitome of this philosophy. The facade was to be covered in a skin of Vitrolite, "a gleaming black glass." Cutting horizontally across this surface was to be a pyramid of six fire escapes outlined in gold metal–work with white panels that would contain advertising signs, while the center of the façade would be bisected by a tower of gold grillwork containing the emergency stairs and which was topped with a delicate, perforated late–gothic spire. The result, at least on paper, was a facade of dramatic contrasts which radiated like a gleaming beacon into the New York City night. "A decorative scheme of such force," he explained, becomes a necessity when the theater has to compete with the sheer bulk and height of surrounding skyscrapers. It is far too easy for a low facade to be crushed and lost in the confusion of metropolitan building."

Aronson, Arnold, “Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban.”

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/architectOfDreams/text.html#theater

Joseph Urban Archives, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/

Plan of proposed Max Reinhardt Theatre, New York. Ryerson and Burnham Architecture Archive, Art Institute of Chicago.

Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), 1911, theater and film director, theatrical producer.

Writing for the June 23 “Talk of the Town,” Murdock Pemberton anticipated the construction of a new theatre to be developed by famed Austrian director/producer Max Reinhardt and designed by Austrian-American architect, illustrator and scenic designer Joseph Urban:

Pemberton, Murdock, “Modern Showcase,” n.d. Source: A New Yorker State of Mind, August 2017. https://newyorkerstateofmind.com/2017/08/

Ziegfeld Theatre, New York, 1927

Urban, with Thomas W. Lamb, designed the Ziegfeld Theatre, named for the famed Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., who financed its construction with backing from William Randolph Hearst. It was built in 1926-1927 at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street.

With a seating capacity of 1,638, the theatre opened February 2, 1927 with the musical Rio Rita. itss second show was its most famous - Jerome Kern’s landmark musical Showboat, which opened December 27, 1927 and ran for 572 performances. The theatre was demolished in 1966 to make way for a skyscraper, the Fisher Brothers’ Burlington House.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziegfeld_Theatre_(1927)

Ziegfeld Theatre: facade and auditorium mural

Detail of mural, Ziegfeld Theatre model. Columbia Digital Library Collections.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/html/proj-13702-gallery.html

The Ziegfeld’s murals were said to be the largest oil paining in the world. A medieval fantasy celebrating life and love decorated the uninterrupted curves of the elliptical auditorium.

Loring, John, Joseph Urban. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2010, p. 51; illustration p. 144.

Joseph Urban Archives, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/

Urban in his New York office, 1920

JOSEPH URBAN, the Vienna-born architect who died in 1933, designed furniture, stage sets, interiors, decorative objects and entire buildings….

But Joseph Urban managed to design sets for the Metropolitan Opera and the Ziegfeld Follies at the same time he was designing buildings for their companies, a neat trick indeed. His remarkable career is far too little appreciated today - in part because none of the design realms in which Urban worked could quite claim him as their own. His career as a set designer, as well as his tendency to give his buildings something of a stage-set quality, made him a bit suspect in architectural circles, and he did not leave an oeuvre of set designs or furniture designs quite large enough to make him a giant in either of those worlds.

Goldberger, Paul, “At the Cooper-Hewitt, Designs of Joseph Urban,” New York Times, Section 1, Page 75, Dec. 20, 1987. Retrieved from:

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/20/arts/at-the-cooper-hewitt-designs-of-joseph-urban.html

#joseph urban #architecture #theater #max reinhardt #new york #ziegfeld #design #stage #unbuilt #1920s #scenic design #ziegfeld follies

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justforbooks · 5 years ago

Photo

Krzysztof Penderecki a leading figure in contemporary music.

The Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who has died aged 86, was an outstanding representative of musical modernism’s success in the 1960s. From the early 70s he became equally emblematic of the subsequent failure of so many of that modernism’s principal pioneers to sustain a lifelong career without abandoning their original principles.

In Penderecki’s case, that appeared to mean the substitution of his early trademark emphasis on sound itself, the innovative textures of his choral and orchestral music replacing themes and tonality as the basis for musical construction, with a more lyrical and Romantic style that seemed more like a continuation of 19th-century compositional concerns than a radical reappraisal of received materials.

The composer’s earlier manner reached its apogee in the St Luke Passion for two vocal soloists, reciter, three mixed choruses, children’s choir and orchestra; its world premiere took place in March 1966 in Münster Cathedral.

As the German critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt put it: “A large ecclesiastical choral work, composed by a representative of the new music in socialist Poland, performed for the first time in a centre of West German Catholicism, in the former bishop’s seat of the daring anti-Nazi Graf von Galen [a prominent critic of the Third Reich when bishop of Münster during the 40s]: this gives occasion to a variety of thoughts.” Many performances worldwide of the Passion took place over the next few years.

Penderecki’s later approach is perhaps best exemplified by the First Violin Concerto, written in 1977 for Isaac Stern; by the Polish Requiem for four soloists, chorus and orchestra (1984, revised in 1993), many sections of which are dedicated to individuals or mass martyrs from Polish history; or by the Credo for five vocal soloists, chorus, children’s choir and orchestra (1998), in which Bach and Polish sources are encountered in a broadly 19th-century harmonic idiom.

Penderecki was born in Dębica, in south-eastern Poland, the youngest of three children of Zofia (nee Wittgenstein) and Tadeusz Penderecki. His father was a lawyer, and an amateur violinist and pianist. Armenian ancestry came from a grandmother, who took the young Penderecki to an Armenian church in Krakow; this aspect of the composer’s heritage was highlighted in 2015 with the premiere of a new choral work, Psalm No 3, commemorating the Armenian Genocide of 1915, at Carnegie Hall, New York.

Composition studies with Artur Malawski and Stanislaw Wiechowicz at the State Higher School of Music (now known as the Academy) in Kraków (1954-58) led to his being appointed a teacher of composition there himself. This was only five years after the death of Stalin; and, despite the advent of the Warsaw autumn international festival of contemporary music in 1956, communist rule in Poland discouraged modernist tendencies.

Penderecki himself was then still writing music essentially neoclassical in style, and in 1958 it must have looked as though the young composer was set for a safe but dull career of merely local significance.

In the following year, however, came a rise both to sudden maturity and to fame surely as swift as that experienced by any composer at any period. Penderecki had, anonymously, as its terms required, submitted three works to a competition organised by the Union of Polish Composers.

When his name turned out to be on the scores winning all the top three prizes, the works involved – Strophes, Emanations and Psalms of David – all immediately became well-known in European avant-garde circles, and commissioners of new works quickly beat a path to his door.

The reasons for Penderecki’s increasing popularity during this time clearly lay in the fact that his reliance on sound itself, rather than on melody or harmony as such – an approach that came to be called “sonorism” – was allied to a highly expressive manner that quickly resonated with listeners beyond the avant garde, promising to create a new public for contemporary music.

The works that Penderecki now began to write – deploying sound masses including unusual instrumental and vocal techniques, and combining conventional and more graphic methods of notation – extended this coupling of experimental sound-world and immediacy of expression to develop a texture-based language of assertive individuality.

In the St Luke Passion, the use of chant, recitative and chorales, not to mention the BACH motif (using German note-names, B flat-A-C-B natural) and occasional major triads, helped to make it famous as an instinctively dramatic reworking of a genre familiar from the baroque period. The work was also very timely since, despite emerging from communist Poland, it expressed a spirit of post-second world war reconciliation. Penderecki’s Passion became regarded as a kind of avant-garde counterpart to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, premiered only four years before it.

An expressive approach to new materials and means such as Penderecki’s found contemporary parallels in the outputs not only of other Polish composers such as Henryk Górecki and, to some extent, Witold Lutosławski, but also in those of Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti. Part of the broader agenda here was a concern to find a way forward that addressed the problems of musical structure and comprehensibility raised by the so-called total serialism of such composers as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and that yet retained a radical attitude to musical materials.

West Germany, in particular, opened its doors to Penderecki in the 60s: the publisher Hermann Moeck and Heinrich Strobel – a radio producer who also ran the Donaueschingen Music Days – were soon prominent champions. It was not long before Penderecki was showered with awards, both in that country and elsewhere.

One of the first of these, a Unesco prize, went to his most famous early composition before the St Luke Passion, his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). Written for 52 strings and originally known as 8’37” (the work’s length), Threnody is classic early Penderecki: its vividly unconventional writing for massed strings, including quarter-tones, tremolos and multiple glissandi, allied – after the composer changed the title – to highly emotive and political subject matter.

This combination would serve him well both at this period and later. Indeed, just as the highly expressive, sometimes programmatically charged, approach of other early works such as Polymorphia for 48 strings (1961), with its thunderously concluding C-major chord, or the Dies Irae for three vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra (1967), which commemorates the dead of Auschwitz, was subsequently carried over into the more conventional sound-world of Penderecki’s output from the 70s onwards, so the potentially incompatible range of musical materials to be found in some of his 60s compositions can sometimes be detected in his output too.

The Polish Requiem and Credo offer two contrasting approaches here: the former incorporating 60s sonoristic effects, the latter more consistently conventional in idiom.

More rigorously modernist commentators soon criticised Penderecki’s scores of the 60s for cheap eclecticism, producing “effects-without-causes” music.

Subsequently, his move into what was often called “neo-Romanticism” supplied them with fresh ammunition, as the view of Penderecki as a “sheep in wolf’s clothing” appeared vindicated. Now that most of the more obviously avant-garde surface aspects of his music had largely disappeared, thematic and tonal underpinning could show through, unencumbered by any remaining equivocations about expressing musical and extra-musical ideas as approachably as possible to a public for whom most contemporary music remains anathema.

Yet those early works, which at the time struck so many as so arresting in their dramatic challenge to convention, now seem – for some listeners at least – shallow, simplistic, or even opportunistic. Penderecki’s subsequent manner, meanwhile, retained the endless chromatic melodic sequences and tritones of the earlier manner in the context of a thematic tonality that could now prove simply banal.

A notable example is the Second Symphony, subtitled the Christmas Symphony (1980), with its quotation of the carol Silent Night: this seems inadequate to the task of handling the religious and political meanings with which it is often charged. Some would argue that the composer had long since proved to be a spent force.

Penderecki’s later, as well as his earlier music, retained some champions, however; both before and after the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981, the composer’s works were adopted as a representation of the struggle between church and state. This did not stop Penderecki from maintaining links with the Polish political establishment in the years immediately after 1981, something that his compatriots Lutosławski and Górecki – the latter also directly linked, like Penderecki, with the Solidarity movement – refused to do.

Works such as the Te Deum for four vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra (1980) – dedicated to Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Kraków, who became Pope John Paul II in October 1978 – and the Polish Requiem – both of which quote old Polish hymns – should be understood in this light.

Other signs of Penderecki’s acceptance included the number of leading international soloists who premiered works by the composer, among them Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom the Second Cello Concerto (1982) was written, and Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom both the Second Violin Concerto, subtitled Metamorphosen (1995), and the capriccio for solo violin solo, entitled La Follia, premiered in 2013, were composed.

Four operas – beginning with a suitably lurid Devils of Loudun (1969), based on a book by Aldous Huxley – received prominent performances, if not very many productions in the UK. Parts of this work, as well as his String Quartet and Kanon For Orchestra and Tape, were used on the soundtrack to the film The Exorcist (1973); and Penderecki’s music featured in films including Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010).

The most recent of the composer’s eight symphonies – subtitled Lieder der Vergänglichkeit (Songs of Transience), for three vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra, a 50-minute choral symphony in 12 movements setting 19th- and early 20th-century German poets – was completed in 2005 and revised in 2008.

Penderecki also worked frequently, and internationally, as a conductor – including, notably, of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich as well as his own. He was rector of the Krakow Academy (1972-87), and taught at Yale University (1973-78).

He is survived by his second wife, Elżbieta Solecka, whom he married in 1965, and by their son and daughter; and by a daughter from his first marriage.

• Krzysztof Penderecki, composer and conductor, born 23 November 1933; died 29 March 2020

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