brutal taskmaster

The claim he was a “brutal taskmaster”? A man who simply had high standards for his employees.

It’s also a backstage musical in which the young protagonist rebels against a brutal taskmaster — like the seminal Broadway show Gypsy, except that, this time, the one in authority is not the heroine’s mother but the hero’s college teacher.

It was a relief to him to know that his father had not spent the last years of his life as he had feared, as a miserable slave--ill treated, reviled, insulted, perhaps chained and beaten by some brutal taskmaster; but had been in a position where, save that he was an exile, kept from his home and wife, his lot had not been unbearable.

He received his early musical training at the hands of Broche, a great musician and the cathedral organist, but a drunkard and brutal taskmaster.

"There!" she said, implying that her fingers had been worked to the bone by a brutal taskmaster.