"Beethoven" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spheres,—music of sound and music of speech,—we find that Beethoven and Mozart, and Milton and Shakespeare, have written. But the symphony is sacred only because, and only so far as, it renders the joy or the sorrow which we have felt. Surely, the interpretation is ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... pile in England, he never wished to see it again; the memories which it would arouse would be too bitter.... The shade of Beethoven touched him as it passed; Mozart, Mendelssohn, Chopin. But he was thinking only of his loneliness, and the marvelous touch of the hands which evoked the great spirits ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... that Miss Keller "has a just and intelligent appreciation of different composers from having literally felt their music, Schumann being her favourite." If she knows the difference between Schumann and Beethoven, it is because she has read it, and if she has read it, she remembers it and can tell any one ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... shall chiefly recollect (apart from personal reasons) for the sparkling freshness and vigour of the air; for the extent and variety of Golden Gate Park, where I found a bust of Beethoven, but no sign of Bret Harte; for the vast reading-room in the library at Berkeley, a university which is so enchantingly situated, beneath such a sun, and in sight of such a bay, that I marvel that any work can be done there at all; and for the miles and miles of perfect tarmac roads fringed with ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... of this story, the author has had occasion to refer to Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata as containing a suggestion of the opening theme of the Fifth Symphony. He has often seen this stated, and believed that the statement was generally accepted as true. Since writing, however, he has heard the opinion expressed, by a musician who is qualified to speak as an ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... monster, Jahweh, the Father of Christ? Is he the God who inspired Buddha, and Shakespeare, and Herschel, and Beethoven, and Darwin, and Plato, and Bach? No; not he. But in warfare and massacre, in rapine and in rape, in black revenge and deadly malice, in slavery, and polygamy, and the debasement of women; and in the pomps, vanities, and greeds of royalty, of clericalism, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... suddenly, the actual physical man had replaced it. And, alarmed, she had drawn back. Perhaps it was the Teutonic blood in him—a grandmother of a German house. And, yet, who could say, perhaps this piece of consuming idealism was from that ancient extinct Germany of Beethoven. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... sketching things. At eighteen one does so pathetically try to feed the burgeoning life with the husks of polite accomplishment. She insisted on withholding from the clutches of the Parish the time to practise Beethoven and Sullivan for an hour daily. Daily, for half an hour, she read an improving book. Just now it was The French Revolution, and Betty thought it would last till she was sixty. She tried to read French and German—Telemaque and Maria Stuart. She fully intended to become ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... Bach to Beethoven and from Beethoven to Wagner—yes, even to Richard Strauss—but enthusiasm with discipline? German music has been our mobilization; it has gone on just as in a partitur by Richard ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... training ship Beethoven sunk by mine; British squadron bombards Turkish troops on Gulf of Saros; Russians sink German steamship Derentie off Turkish coast; Norwegian ship Vaaren sunk by mine in North Sea; three British ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... and write, women who can tactfully smooth over a roughness and for Christ's sake bear a snub, and take any place which may open. Women who can take everything to Jesus and there get strength to smile and persevere and pull on under any circumstances. If they can play Beethoven and paint and draw and speak French and German so much the better, but we can want all these latter accomplishments if they have only a loving heart, willing hands, and common sense. Surely such women are ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... wraps. But Leslie settled that question speedily. "I'll take Rags and run up the beach to our bungalow and bring them to you, if Phyllis will lend me her slickers," she declared. "No, you mustn't come with me, Ted. I'll be perfectly safe with Rags, and while I'm gone, you can all be giving that Beethoven sonata that you promised Aunt Marcia. I won't ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... said, pointing to sheet music by Weber, Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Hrold, Wagner, Auber, Gounod, Victor Mass, and a number of others scattered over a full size piano-organ, which occupied one of the wall panels in ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... monster the Father of Christ? Is he the God who inspireth Buddha and Shakespeare and Beethoven and Darwin and Plato? No, not he. But in warfare and massacre, in rapine and rape, in black revenge and in deadly malice, in slavery and polygamy, and the debasement of women, and in the pomps, vanities and greeds of royalty, of clericalism, and of usury and barter—we ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... proceeds from the theory that all life in New England is to be pictured as bare and pallid, it must seem very wrong in her to use tints so daring; but if one believes that life here, as elsewhere, may be passionate as Petrarch and deep as Beethoven, there appears no reason why all descriptive art should ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... delighted in grotesqueness and aberrations from good taste. The origin of synagogue melodies was attributed to remoter and remoter periods; the most soulful hymns were adapted to frivolous airs. Later still, at a time when German music had risen to its zenith, when Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven flourished, the Jewish strolling musician Klesmer, a mendicant in the world of song as in the world of finance, was wandering through the provinces ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... familiar epithet or expression, I fancy it is with much the same sense of satisfaction that we older people feel when in the midst of a long programme of new music the orchestra strikes into something we have heard before,—Handel, maybe, or one of the more familiar Beethoven sonatas. "I know that! I have heard that before!" we think, triumphant, and settle down to enjoyment without effort. So it is, probably, with the "middle-sized" articles of the bears' house and the "and I sha'n't get home to-night" of the old woman. Each recurrence ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... that the "Liberal Social Union" would devote one of their sweetly heretical evenings at the Beethoven Rooms, Harley Street, to an examination of the Darwinian development of the Evil Spirit, was one not to be scorned by an inquirer into the more eccentric and erratic phases of theology. Literary engagements stood in ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... sentences of this extract give admirable expression to one feature of Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature. In the deepest poetry, as in the loftiest music,—in Wordsworth's lyrics as in Beethoven's sonatas—it is by what they unerringly suggest and not by what they exhaustively express that their truth and power are known. "In what he leaves unsaid," wrote Schiller, "I discover the master of style." ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... gentle music, quivering like the voice of a great-grandmother in powdered hair. Mozart, he's the precursory genius—the first who endowed an orchestra with an individual voice; and those two will live mostly because they created Beethoven. Ah, Beethoven! power and strength amidst serene suffering, Michael Angelo at the tomb of the Medici! A heroic logician, a kneader of human brains; for the symphony, with choral accompaniments, was the starting-point of all the great ones ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in gray clothes!—of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering levee!—of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody!—of Epaminondas, "who never says anything, but will listen eternally!"—of Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... "Moonlight Sonata" is an absurd title which has for years been attached, both in Germany and England, to one of Beethoven's sonatas. It is said to have been derived from the expression of a German critic comparing the first movement to a boat wandering by moonlight ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... players of the season, and Epicurus' soul could rest in peace, for her chef had an international reputation. Oh, remember, you music-fed ascetic, many, aye, very many, regard the transition from Tschaikowsky to terrapin, from Beethoven to burgundy with hearts aflame with anticipatory joy—and ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... discovery in God. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are discoveries in God, but so are the advances in knowledge made by Plato, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Edison. He shows Himself through Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul, but also through Homer, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Darwin, George Eliot, William James, and Henry Irving. I take the names at random as illustrating different branches of endeavour, and if I use only great ones it is not that the lesser are excluded. No one ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... now invite your attention to the wind instruments, which, in Handel's time, were chiefly used to double in unison the parts of stringed instruments. Their modern independent use dates from Haydn; it was extended and perfected by Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber; and the extraordinary changes and improvements which have been effected during the present century have given wind instruments an importance that is hardly exceeded by that of the stringed, in the formation of the modern orchestra. The military band, as it now exists, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... of whispering leaves and gloom, I saw, too dark, too dumb for bronze or stone, One tragic head that bowed against the sky; O, in a hush too deep for any tomb I saw Beethoven, dreadfully alone With his own ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... Fitz was enivre as a young man. Among them are a great many drawings of Handel; FitzGerald, like Samuel Butler, was an enthusiastic Handelian. The pictures are annotated by E.F.G. and there are also two drawings of Beethoven traced by Thackeray. This scrapbook was compiled by FitzGerald when he and Thackeray were living together in London, visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights of young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... a walk, and take up her work again when she returned. She was getting her coat and hat when Mr. Clendon began to play; she changed her mind about the walk and went to the door to open it an inch or so, that she might hear more distinctly the soft strains of the Beethoven Sonata which came floating up to her. As she opened the door, she heard a strange sound rising above the notes of the music; it was that, perhaps, most terrible of all sounds, the unbidden, irresistible groan, rising from a man's ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... bird-notes. Lo, this tearful night Methinks I see thee, fresh from Death's despite, Perched in a palm-grove, wild with pantomime O'er blissful companies couched in shady thyme. Methinks I hear thy silver whistlings bright Meet with the mighty discourse of the wise, — 'Till broad Beethoven, deaf no more, and Keats, 'Midst of much talk, uplift their smiling eyes And mark the music of thy wood-conceits, And half-way pause on some large courteous word, And call thee 'Brother,' O thou ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... things that I can play. I always had a taste for music; and up in one of the forts there was an old melodeon, so I hammered away for years. I had to learn difficult things at the start, or none at all, or else those I improvised; and that's how I can play one or two of Beethoven's symphonies pretty well, and this song, and a few others, and go a cropper with a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... for a straight rider and plain speaker, Who meant his words and had words for his meaning. And Lake and Zell, between the jests at table, Where they could match the best wits of the room, Would talk of things that Dane and the rest counted As pointing ways not good for level minds. Why pose about Beethoven, and Debussy, Or these French fellows Degas and Picasso, When there were Marcus Stone, and A Long, Long Trail, And "A Little Grey Home in the West," that common folk Could understand? And, however the truth might be, It wasn't decent openly to say That William Wordsworth was a better ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... breeds the trees Breeds cities too, and symphonies. Equally her beauty flows Into a savior, or a rose — Looks down in dream, and from above Smiles at herself in Jesus' love. Christ's love and Homer's art Are but the workings of her heart; Through Leonardo's hand she seeks Herself, and through Beethoven speaks In holy thunderings around The awful message of ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... robbed his relations of the charm of illegality, of the delight of the prohibited, Mary would discover some orchestra leader who bore a still greater resemblance to the other man, or some ugly violinist with long hair and possessed of youth who would remind her of Beethoven in his boyhood. Besides, he was of different race, different customs and passions; he was tired of her shamefaced reserve in love, of her resistance to final submission which had pleased him at first, but which had come at last to bore ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... conquer, and he conquered it at the rate of about two great masters a month. From Handel to Richard Strauss, even from Palestrina to Debussy, the achievements of genius lay at his mercy. He criticized them with a freedom that was entirely unprejudiced by tradition. Beethoven was no more to him than Arthur Sullivan—indeed, was rather less. The works of his choice were the "Tannhaeuser" overture, a potpourri of Verdi's "Aida," Chopin's Study in Thirds (which ravished him), and a selection ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... you are all for Beethoven," the professor is saying. "Young people find such melody in 'Songs without Words.' But I want you to listen to this nocturne of Chopin's, though it is not ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... more for the doctor. From time to time he turned and signed to De Silvis, as he heard the loved notes of 'unser Schumann,' 'unser Beethoven,' or even of ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... only just heard, from Mrs. Carnaby, that you are back in town. Could you spare us tomorrow evening? It would be so nice of you. The quartet will give Beethoven's F minor, and Alma says it will be well done—the conceit of the child! We hope to have some interesting people What a shocking affair of poor Mrs. Carnaby's! I never knew anything quite so ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Goethe, Milton, the two Bacons, Lessing, Richter, Schiller, Carlyle, Hegel, Luther, Behmen, Swedenborg, Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Cromwell, Frederick II., Wellington, Newton, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Beethoven, Handel, Turner; and nations might be enriched out of the names that remain when the supreme ones in each class have been mentioned. Consider what incomparable range and variety, as well as depth, of genius are here affirmed. Greece and India possessed powers not equally represented here; but otherwise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... there is a Pilgrim Song by Dr. Horatius Bonar, and the music is from Beethoven; it is very sweet ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... this literature in the works of a few great masters who have set the pace and established the limits for all the rest. In the line of purely instrumental music this has been done by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. The latter, who exercised a vast influence upon the manner of developing a musical thought and in the selection of the orchestral colors in which it can be expressed advantageously, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... time, music for the most part moved in narrow limits: it concerned itself with the permanent states of man, or with what the Greeks call ethos. And only with Beethoven did it begin to find the language of pathos, of passionate will, and of the dramatic occurrences in the souls of men. Formerly, what people desired was to interpret a mood, a stolid, merry, reverential, or penitential state of mind, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... instead of giving them a more intense and poignant expression, which at some moments is all the divinest music seems to do. Their influence is always benign and serene, and we may always have recourse to it, while the secrets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann lie hidden between leaves, in the keeping of crabbed little hieroglyphs, and a voice, an instrument, or perhaps an orchestra, is needed to reveal them. The picture, the statue, has no secrets but open secrets. You stand before it, and the very soul and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... was ten, my teacher decided that I was sufficiently prepared to give a concert in the Salle Pleyel, so I played there, accompanied by an Italian orchestra, with Tilmant as the conductor. I gave Beethoven's Concerto in C minor and one of Mozart's concertos in B flat. There was some question of my playing at the Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire, and there was even a rehearsal. But Seghers, who afterwards founded the Societe St. Cecile, was ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... sere of virginal decay, I view her as she enters, day by day, As a sweet sunset almost overpast. Kindly and calm, patrician to the last, Superbly falls her gown of sober gray, And on her chignon's elegant array The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste. She talks BEETHOVEN; frowns disapprobation At BALZAC'S name, sighs it at 'poor GEORGE SAND'S'; Knows that she has exceeding pretty hands; Speaks Latin with a right accentuation; And gives at need (as one who understands) ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... with beauty beyond grace. In each of them there is a palpitating thought, torn from the artist's soul and crystallised in marble. It has been said that architecture is petrified music. In the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of Beethoven. Each of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like Niobe to stone. They have the intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the motives of a symphony. In their allegories, left without a key, sculpture has passed beyond ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... who rather piqued herself upon her music, and who was learned in Bach and Beethoven, and had an opinion of her own about Wagner. Mrs. Tom brightened visibly, for her girls played not a little, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of Gibbon or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his beloved violin. The air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition and the soft warmth of spiritual authority; his friendship with Hurrell Froude did the rest. All that ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... sang, and Beethoven made music, and Goethe and Schiller wrote and Schopenhauer thought! If ever a land had the philosophy and the poetry of democracy Germany had it. Democracy tried to bloom in the revolutionary days of the forties, but Germany strangled her voices. ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... known by his work. You stand in front of some great picture, or you listen to some great symphony, or you read some great book, and you say, 'This is the glory of Raphael, Beethoven, Shakespeare.' Christ points to His saints, and He says, 'Behold My handiwork! Ye are my witnesses. This is what ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... music for that which it cannot afford, such as the ideas contained in words. Any one must admit the futility of the attempt to give a dramatic interpretation or language to instrumental music, who reads the description attempted by Lenz and other writers of some of Beethoven's sonatas. Instrumental music does not lend itself to these interpretations, since it is an art with an independent existence. We have observed that in its first development it was used as an accompaniment to the voice, or associated with the movements of the body, or with the dance, and ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... stranger in New York to get away from Fifth Avenue. The street seems to hold him fast. There might almost as well be no other avenues; and certainly the word "Fifth" has lost all its numerical significance in current usage. A youthful musical student, upon being asked how many symphonies Beethoven had composed, replied four, and obstinately stuck to it that Beethoven had only composed four. Called upon to enumerate the four, he answered thus, the C minor, the Eroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth. "Ninth" had lost ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... He is not called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs. He is in the costume of a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar, and appears to be making an offer of marriage to his cook. Beethoven both my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the good fortune to meet; he is an engineer now, and does not know one note from another; he has quite lost his deafness, is married, and is, of course, a little squat man with the ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... say, to the Music of that grand last Scene in Fidelio: Sullivan & Co. supplying the introductory Recitative; beginning dreamily, and increasing, crescendo, up to where the Poet begins to 'feel the truth and Stir of Day'; till Beethoven's pompous March should begin, and the Chorus, with 'Arthur is come, etc.'; the chief Voices raising the words aloft (as they do in Fidelio), and the Chorus thundering in upon them. It is very grand in Fidelio: and I am persuaded ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... to the next generation, but musically he has more in common with Paisiello than with Rossini. His principal claim to immortality rests upon the fact that a performance of his opera 'Eleonora' inspired Beethoven with the idea of writing 'Fidelio'; but although his serious efforts are comparatively worthless, many of his comic operas are exceedingly bright and attractive. 'Le Maitre de Chapelle,' which was ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... leaves, and struck the opening notes of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, and made ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that the new Empire was to be republican. But it quickly passed away; and no Frenchman, except perhaps Carnot, made so manly a protest as the man of genius at Vienna, who had composed the "Sinfonia Eroica," and with grand republican simplicity inscribed it, "Beethoven a Bonaparte." When the master heard that his former hero had taken the imperial crown, he tore off the dedication with a volley of curses on the renegade and tyrant; and in later years he dedicated the immortal work to the memory of a ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... future she has all this to bequeath and, in addition, the intellectual wealth of her present stage of development. Consider Germany's contributions to the arts, the poetical achievements of the period of Schiller and Goethe, the music of Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; the thought systems of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... about drawing and scumbling and glazing and perspective and anatomy and 'marvellous foreshortening' than Giotto, the latchet of whose shoe they were nevertheless not worthy to unloose. Compare Mozart's Magic Flute, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Wagner's Ring, all of them reachings-forward to the new Vitalist art, with the dreary pseudo-sacred oratorios and cantatas which were produced for no better reason than that Handel ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls. Old Jolyon could not bear a strong cigar or Wagner's music. He loved Beethoven and Mozart, Handel and Gluck, and Schumann, and, for some occult reason, the operas of Meyerbeer; but of late years he had been seduced by Chopin, just as in painting he had succumbed to Botticelli. In yielding to these tastes he had been conscious of divergence ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that moment, had a mocking, lovely face, the darkest blue eyes, and quantities of long, black hair. She wore a violet dress, her hands were white, and she talked like a Blue Book set to music by Beethoven. Yes, he must have ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... German would cry, after spending an hour in going through some trashy modern Italian music. "Now, my child, you shall hear something worth listening to;" and with a sigh of relief he would turn to some old piece by Mozart or Bach, some minuet of Haydn's, some romance of Beethoven's, which he would play with no great power of execution, indeed, but with a rare sweetness and delicacy of touch and expression, and with an intense absorption in the music, which communicated itself to even so small a listener ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... different one from that of most English girls. Since, I have wondered sometimes what would be the result upon the musical taste of a person who was put through a course of Wagnerian opera first, and then turned over to the Italian school—leaving Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, to take care of themselves, as they may very well do—thus exactly reversing the ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... had joyously consented to participate in it. The most distinguished names of the aristocracy and the artistic circles of Vienna were at the head of the committee of arrangements. Among those names were those of the Princes Lichnowsky and Lichtenstein, the Countesses Kaunitz and Spielmann, of Beethoven and Salieri, Kreutzer and Clementi, and finally, those of ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... view of these facts, does it not appear that if there is any one distinctively feminine characteristic, it is the mother-instinct for government? But now with clearer vision we reread the record of the past. True, we find no Raphael or Beethoven, no Phidias or Michael Angelo among women. No woman has painted the greatest picture, carved the finest statue, composed the noblest oratorio or opera. Not many women's names appear after Joan of Arc's in the long list of warriors; but, as a ruler, woman stands to-day ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Landor of having sacrificed all things to style: it were as wise to assert that Beethoven sacrificed harmony to time. If his accusers would but read Landor before criticising, a proper regard for their own reputations would prevent them from hazarding such an opinion. "Style," writes Landor, "I consider as nothing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... posthumous is probably the result of his exceeding simplicity and diffidence, for he always shrank from popular applause; therefore we may believe his compositions were not placed in the proper light during his life. It was through Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, that the musical world learned what a master-spirit had wrought in the person of John Sebastian Bach. The first time Mozart heard one of Bach's hymns, he said, "Thank God! I learn something absolutely new." Bach's great compositions ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... avenue of approach to the musical sense. The first ambition for one who would appreciate music should be to cultivate this power of hearing. It is quite possible to be stone-deaf outwardly and yet hear most beautiful sounds within the brain. This was approximately the case with Beethoven after his thirtieth year. On the other hand, many people have a perfect outward apparatus for hearing but nothing is ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... There are a million ways to communicate. Michelangelo communicated, Bach, Beethoven, yes, Elvis Presley communicates. Hemingway, Martha Graham, actors, dancers, ...
— The Alternate Plan • Gerry Maddren
... the record of Beethoven's thought, And made the dumb chords speak both clear and low, And spread the dead man's voice till I was caught Away, and now seemed long and long ago. Methought in Tellus' bosom still I lay, While centuries like steeds tramped overhead, To the wild rhythms that, by night ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... a piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered, so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... waltz; Yet distance gives it dignity. Who knows? Journeying through the woods the master haunted. Under the cyclamen, among the bracken, It may have chanced upon Beethoven's soul! ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... at the opening of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London the ode written by Tennyson for the occasion. She frequently sang before Queen Victoria, the German emperor and others of the crowned heads of Europe, and received numerous marks of their esteem. In 1897 she was awarded the gold Beethoven medal by the London Philharmonic Society, "as a mark of appreciation of her exceptional genius and musical attainments, and of her generous and artistic nature.'' She marriedin 1878 Ernest Gye, the theatrical manager. Her stage name of Madame ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... that the recently reported BEETHOVEN Centennial Jubilee was a myth. There is no such building in New York as was described, and no concerts have taken place. The reports in the local papers were written by unscrupulous Bohemians in the pay of the musicians ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... very much which he could not imagine with any definiteness presents new images every moment—the eloquence of look and gesture, the by-play, the inexhaustible significance of the human voice. There are people who fancy they have more music in their souls than was ever translated into harmony by Beethoven or Mozart. There are others who think they could paint pictures, write poetry—in short, do anything, if they only made the effort. To them what is accomplished by the practised actor seems easy and simple. But as ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... art. Indeed one might say that there has been a continual slow decline in all the arts of Europe, except music, since the year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly declining since the death of Beethoven. But with this slow inexorable decline of the arts there has been a great advance in nearly everything else, in knowledge, in power, even in morality. Upon everything man has been able to exercise his will except upon the arts. Where he has really wished for progress there he has got it, except ...
— Progress and History • Various
... would conduct, even at the time when his deafness had become almost complete. The musicians, in order to keep together, agreed at length to follow the slight indications of time which the concertmeister (first violin-player) gave them; and not to attend to Beethoven's conducting-stick. Moreover, it should be observed, that conducting a symphony, an overture, or any other composition whose movements remain continual, vary little, and contain few nice gradations, is child's play in comparison with conducting ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... most inattentive of historical students who can afford to ignore this. No modern aesthetician from the Rhine to the Spree affects to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various forms of passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul, or Weber, or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high priest of the pre-historic cult—down to Richard Wagner himself! It was precisely this that ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... class of difficulties described, let us ask how we are to interpret the development of the musical faculty. I will not enlarge on the family antecedents of the great composers. I will merely suggest the inquiry whether the greater powers possessed by Beethoven and Mozart, by Weber and Rossini, than by their fathers, were not due in larger measure to the inherited effects of daily exercise of the musical faculty by their fathers, than to inheritance, with increase, of spontaneous ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... been able even to have a bath, or go to the Italian Opera, two things that are more necessary to him than bread. His works abound in references to his beloved art, and when he was writing "Massimilla Doni" he employed a professional musician to instruct him about it. Beethoven, in particular, he speaks of with the utmost enthusiasm, and after hearing his "Symphony in Ut mineur," he says that the great musician is the only person who makes him feel jealous, and that he prefers him even to Rossini and Mozart. "The spirit of the writer," he says, "cannot ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... them is from this standpoint at once evident. The Greek view of the world is as classic as the plastic art of Phidias and the epic of Homer; the Christian, as eternally valid as the architecture of the Middle Ages; the modern, as irrefutable as Goethe's poetry and the music of Beethoven. The views of the world which proceed from the spirits of different ages, as products of the general development of culture, are not so much thoughts as rhythms in thinking, not theories but modes of intuition ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... knows, this is the first book on the subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved;" the letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Chorley, but in his spelling. When his contadini have done their day's work he takes it on him to read aloud to them the poems of the revolutionary Venetian poet Dall' Ongaro, to their great applause. Then I must tell you of his music. He is strong in music for ten years old—and plays a sonata of Beethoven already (in E flat—opera 7) and the first four books of Stephen Heller; to say nothing of various pieces by modern German composers in which there is need of considerable execution. Robert is the maestro, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... graces of manner and goodness of soul. He was a close friend of the Baltimore musicians, such as Madame Falk-Auerbach, a pupil of Rossini's and a teacher in the Conservatory of Music, "a woman who plays Beethoven with the large conception of a man, and yet nurses her children all day with a noble simplicity of devotion such as I have rarely seen," said Lanier. Outside of musical circles he had access to the homes of the most prominent people of Baltimore, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... His guests—the top and flower of Time, The fore-front of an age which now had learned to climb The slopes where Newton knelt, the heights that Shakespeare trod, The mountains whence Beethoven rolled the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... failure of art, before they can see its beauty or demand that beauty from the artist. When they themselves become like little children, then they see that the greatest artists, in all their seeming triumphs, are like little children too. For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it is not the arrogant, the accomplished, the magnificent, that moves us. They are great men to us; but they achieved beauty because in their effort to achieve it they were little children to themselves. They impose awe on us, but it is ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... spent his best years on second-rate operas, and devoted his declining energies to oratorio, we have to guess at rather than reach by direct disclosure; and till Mr. Thayer shall take away the mantle which yet covers his Beethoven, we shall know but little of the interior nature of that wonderful man. But Mendelssohn now stands before us, disclosed by the most searching of all processes, his own letters to his own friends. And how graceful, how ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... passed over to the organ, and performed some sacred music of Mozart and Beethoven. They then paused and looked round, as ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... until Mrs. Duane, seeing the Captain return, ran to him and asked, were the Crows on the war-path? Then her Frank told her yes, and that he had detailed Albumblatt to vanquish them and escort them to Carlisle School to learn German and Beethoven's sonatas. ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... a general belief that the mistake made by the managers of the symphony concert in Central Music Hall night before last was in not opening the concert with Beethoven's "Eroica," instead of making it the last number on the programme. We incline to the opinion, however, that, in putting the symphony last, the managers complied with the very first requirement of dramatic composition. This requirement is to the effect that you must ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... leisure of the evening, while Constance's grand piano seemed to stir the very air with a dream of harmony. The room was lined with low book-cases; above Shakespeare stood his bust; above the many volumes on musical themes, busts of Beethoven and Wagner; pictures—not costly paintings, but engravings, photo-gravures, and etchings, scenes from other lands, sweet spiritual faces, suggestions of great lives—looked down from the walls; while over all, as a frieze to the oaken room, ran the words: ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... is wondering herself that she never did. They are not satisfied with hearing her once. They ask for more, and they get it. The other evening I had to keep quiet on my chair while she thumped through four pieces one after the other, including the Beethoven Sonata. We knew it was the Beethoven Sonata. She told us before she started it was going to be the Beethoven Sonata, otherwise, for all any of us could have guessed, it might have been the 'Battle of Prague.' ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... the ladies and guessed its import. "My little Feodorovna is about to sing? Then we shall all have a treat, for let me tell you, Lady Olivia, that my young friend possesses the voice of an angel, and the knowledge how to use it properly. Now, what is it to be? Tschaikowski, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Handel, Mozart? Ah, here is something that will suit your voice, little one, 'Caro mio ben!' by Giuseppe Giordani— quaint, delicate, old-fashioned. Come, I will play your accompaniment for you." And, taking the girl's hand, von Schalckenberg, who was an ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the opera as one of the great civilizers. No one can listen to the symphonies of Beethoven, or the music of Schubert, without receiving a benefit. And no one can hear the operas of Wagner without feeling that he ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and my host himself was no mean amateur upon the flute. Our evenings would pass quickly away, in reading Shakspeare, Corneille, Racine, Metastasio, or the modern writers of English literature: after which we would remain till the night had far advanced, enjoying the beautiful compositions of Beethoven, Gluck, and Mozart, or the brilliant overtures of ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... the young people of our happy century, has been accustomed, for three or four consecutive years, to press her fingers on the keys of a piano, a long-suffering instrument. She has hammered out Beethoven, warbled the airs of Rossini and run through the exercises of Crammer. I had already taken pains to convince her of the excellence of music; to attain this end, I have applauded her, I have listened without yawning to the most tiresome sonatas in the world, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... uncover, one's true style; to lay bare one's self: how is this to be set about? Primarily, by experiment in the way of imitation, which is the commencement of all art. Every great artist—Shakspere, Beethoven, Velasquez, Inigo Jones—has started by imitating the models which he admired and to which he felt drawn. You must do the same. It is the surest and indeed the only way of arriving at one's ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style. And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what—that is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... safety by a faithful suitor, whom she, however, detested. I had an irresistible impulse to call this maiden 'Adelaide.' As even at that early age I was a great enthusiast for everything really German, I can only account for the obviously un-German name of my heroine by my infatuation for Beethoven's Adelaide, whose tender refrain seemed to me the symbol of all loving appeals. The course of my drama was now characterised by the strange delays which took place in the accomplishment of this last murder of vengeance, the chief obstacle to which lay in the sudden ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... father, for she is getting entirely beyond my control. If I attempt to make her study she writes poetry instead of her exercises, draws caricatures instead of sketching properly, and bewilders her music teacher by asking questions about Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as if they were personal friends of his. If I beg her to take exercise, she rides like an Amazon all over the Island, grubs in the garden as if for her living, or goes paddling about the bay till I'm distracted lest the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... lingering notes of an andante from one of Beethoven's sublime symphonies clashed the loud ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... unquestionably the greatest theatrical pageant ever staged in this country. The elaborate settings were handled mechanically. Forests dissolved into regal courts; fields melted into castles. A hidden orchestra played the superb music of Beethoven's "Eroica," which accentuated ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... swallowed by gaping earthquakes, impart a certain solemnity to the brightest of comedies, still there is a general impression among the audience that BOOTH'S has become a place of amusement. And in noting this change PUNCHINELLO does not mean to jeer at the former and normal character of BOOTH'S. BEETHOVEN'S Seventh Symphony, DANTE'S Inferno, JEFFERSON'S Rip Van Winkle, and EDWIN BOOTH'S Hamlet are not amusing, but it does not follow that they are therefore unworthy of the attention of the public, which is pleased with the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... Germania," supposed by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars" of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and Goethe and Schiller, and was not ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war in his members sometimes divides the man's attention. He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation. He brings into the talk other ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson |
