Just as on that day he brought rigour and joy to the familiar sounds of the talented young Mendelssohn, so here on his birthday he found powerful lyricism and tenderness in the raw and the new.
"Madama Butterfly," for all its greatness, certainly has problems: the sexist diminution of Cio-Cio-San (the title character, a fifteen-year-old Japanese geisha) and the Orientalist condescension toward Japanese culture coexist with powerful expressions of tenderness, nobility, and, of course, melodic genius of a high order.
"It is a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness," Professor Lee said.
He talked about how the impersonal machinery of modernity had destroyed the values and sensitivities, the tenderness and powerful connection that came from living close to the earth.
Professor Lee said of the winning novel: "It is a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.
The Square Mile's 7,000 residents are also of interest to Braden, who often contrasts powerful architecture against the tenderness of people living on the City's housing estates, as well as those working nearby.
One might see in Cassatt's prints, for example, the working out of a certain fundamental psychological polarity: an underlying tension between a distancing, coolly analytic formality and powerful impulses of empathic tenderness.
It is also a horribly American type: so strong, so anxious to be thought powerful, yet so desperate for tenderness.
It's a powerful piece, full of a fierce tenderness for its lost souls.
Why, they wondered, is sweetness and tenderness seen as not powerful; why is the efficiency we associate with machinery considered more valuable than empathy, mutually exclusive with it?
