"Sonata" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glanced at her programme; she would have understood nothing of it if she had; but it gave the Sonata, Op. III, as ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... her emotions were whipped by an attachment—for the tenor of Roger's life, with its whole-hearted collection of house property, had induced in his only daughter a tendency towards passion—she turned to great and sincere work, choosing the sonata form, for the violin. This was the only one of her productions that troubled the Forsytes. They felt at once that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the young composer. Cannabich had a daughter named Rosa, a girl of thirteen, exceedingly pretty and clever, and Wolfgang appears to have admired her very much, and perhaps for a time to have flirted and been in love with her. He wrote her a sonata, and was delighted with the way in which she played it; the andante, he said, he had composed to represent her, and when it was finished he vowed she was just what the andante was. But this little love affair, if it existed, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... imagine two friends to be seated side by side in the concert hall, listening to the performance of a violin sonata by an artist of about mediocre ability. Suppose one of the friends to be a highly trained musical critic, the other to be almost unacquainted with music of this class. Let us now inquire how the tones of the violin will impress these two hearers; ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... These a young man longs to know of, they are his life. He imagines himself sitting by her, when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name; sometimes she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata. Letting her hands droop upon the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of life, of its disenchantments. He knows well what she means, he has suffered as she has; but could he tell her, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... be very kind of you," she said. "It's so seldom that any one realizes what these things mean to the cook. A souffle like this is an inspiration—like a sonata to a musician. But no one ever dreams of the cook; and the most you can expect from a butler is, 'Oh, it cut very nice, ma'am, I'm sure. Very nice!'" She made a despairing gesture. "But some people would call ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... expression in the written rhapsodies addressed to "Chiarina" in his new music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik. In a more purely musical manner, his feelings took shape in such works as his "Daidsbuendler" Dances, the "Chiarina" of the Carnival, the F-Sharp Minor Sonata, the Kreisleriana, the Humoreske, the Novelettes, and the Nocturnes,—truly an offering of rare beauty, and well worthy to express the feelings of the inspired lover. They bore witness of his adoration to all who knew him, and all who were able to listen with understanding ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... medley of love a man's soul sings a sonata, while his heart plays a waltz and his pulse ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... sitting drowsily listening to the snoring of the prince, who was in his large study. From the far side of the house through the closed doors came the sound of difficult passages—twenty times repeated—of a sonata by Dussek. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... We have remained arid, hard, incapable of absorbing, while whole Joachim quartets flowed and rippled all round, but never into, us; and then, some other time, our soul seems to have drunk up (every fibre blissfully steeping) a few bars of a sonata (it was Beethoven's 10th violin, and they were stumbling through it for the first time) heard accidentally while walking up and down under an ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... to Delaherche's unceasing chatter, blushing if ever Gilberte asked him to pass her the salt, while at evening M. de Gartlauben, seated in the study, with eyes upturned in silent ecstasy, listened to a sonata by Mozart performed for his benefit by the young woman in the adjoining drawing-room, a stillness as of death continued to pervade the apartment where Colonel de Vineuil and Madame Delaherche spent their days, the blinds ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... different from Wagner's; orchestral movement, color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an altogether different stirring of the musical caldron. A song of Moussorgsky's or Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelleas" or "Le Sacre du printemps," a single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite of Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of the older music can equal. For our own moment of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... saw John Fiske happier than once at Concord. Our host had invited us for a day and had prepared a programme that only Concord could furnish. The prelude was a performance of the Andante to a Sonata of Rubinstein, Opus 12, rendered exquisitely by the daughter of our host. I saw the great frame of my fellow-guest heave with emotion while his breath came almost in sobs as his spirit responded to the music. Then came a canoe-trip on the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... intensity of application and upon our knowledge of the themes and of the general purpose of the work. Only with increased familiarity does the architecture stand revealed. Beethoven, it is said, when once asked the meaning of a sonata of his, played it over again and replied, "It means that." Music is itself. The question for every music-lover is: can I equip myself in such a way as to feel at home in this language, to receive the message as directly as possible, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the Professor, some evening when I have nothing else to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as one of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius. The vox humana of the great Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ of the Cambridge chapel might be ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is still speaking, somebody in the next room has begun to play the finale of Beethoven's Sonata in D-minor (Op. 31, No. 3). The allegretto is first played piano, then more forte, and at last passionately, violently, ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... should like to tell you! No, not Beethoven; a little, just a little music. Heavens!" cried Reginald, as she crashed into a fortissimo, "another sonata! Listen, I am not equal to sonatas. Nay, Miss Beecham, play me a little ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... vaudeville, "A Lover's Humor," to which he wrote the music and the verses at the same time, so that the action and movement of the play grew out of the making of the verses and the music. He was likewise prompted to compose in the prevailing forms of music, and produced a sonata, a string ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... play a Mozart sonata yet, Isabel? The more need to practice. All one's life is a music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time. But there must be ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... to find the old unhappy far off things which Wordsworth imagined in the Gaelic song of the 'Highland Lass.' I feel out of it, uneasy, thinking all the time what a poor creature I must be. I remember the mother of the sonata players approaching me with beaming countenance on the occasion of one of these performances, expecting the compliment which I faltered forth, doing my best not to look insincere. 'And I have this every evening of my life,' cried the triumphant mother. 'Good heavens, and you have survived it all' ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... tearing show." She wore a white poudesoy gown, embroidered with gold, and the prettiest high-heeled satin slippers, and a head-dress of wonderful workmanship. "For I have been at a concert of music, cousin Dick, and heard two overtures of Mr. Handel's and a sonata by Corella, done by the ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... that they would like anything she would play, and after a moment's hesitation . . . it was always a leap in the dark to play to people about whose musical capacities you hadn't the faintest idea . . . she took out the Beethoven Sonata album and turned to the Sonata Pathetique. Beethoven of the early middle period was the safest guess with such entirely unknown listeners. For all that she really knew, they might want her to play Chaminade and Moskowsky. Mr. Welles, the nice old man, might find ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... come when a German street-band will be recognized as a powerful tonic; a cornet solo will take the place of a blister; a symphony or a sonata may be recommended instead of morphine; the moxa will give way to Wagner, and opium to Brahms. A prolonged shake by a singer will drive out chills and fever, according to the theory of Hahnemann. Cots at symphony concerts may yet command ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... 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, and sits by him two hours every ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... that go to see a Rafael picture or to hear a Bach sonata and have an exclamation all ready, give me the sad impression of a flock of lambs. As for your sublime pedagogues of the Ruskin type, they seem to me to be the fine flower of priggishness, of pedantry, ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... she 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.' We all sat round with wooden faces, staring at our boots. Afterwards those ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... pathetic sonata; but the time got decidedly erratic, as she stared bewildered at Alec, and then went off into a fit of laughing. "How could you be such a goose? If Colonel Rolleston had been at home, he would have fired his ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... the advertisements that the Fokines are to dance Beethoven's "Moonshine" sonata. The ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... should it bother him?" rejoined M. Verdurin. "I'm sure M. Swann has never heard the sonata in F sharp which we discovered; he is going to play us the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the hubbub, intoxicated her; she made up stories by the dozen, as her dark eyes followed the gay equipages. When Fraeulein summoned her she went away reluctantly; the stories got into her head, and stopped there all the time she laboured through that long sonata. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Fleisch, sat down at the piano and performed a series of pieces in illustration of what he had explained to me, including a sonata in four bars, a symphony in three chords, and a song without words, in paraphrase of Mr. Spence's "fragment" in celebration of a night passed in the tomb. I was so thrilled and delighted by these ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... Sonata-Fantasia in C minor. She played very well, though rather over correctly and precisely. She sat upright and immovable, her eyes fixed on the notes, and her lips tightly compressed, only at the end of the sonata her face glowed, ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... the last harpsichords made. The date upon the case was 1802. Beethoven's famous "Moonlight Sonata" was written for either harpsichord or piano. It was published in 1802. Hummel played on the harpsichord as late as 1805, but it had to give way, though most reluctantly, to the new invention called the pianoforte. Just how slow the public was in accepting the innovation and improvement ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... down at the piano, with a vague notion of playing the sonata in E minor, Grieg's, of course, which had been her favourite, and was the best and finest, in his opinion, after Beethoven's sonata in D minor; not because E comes after D, but because ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... the keys, he shook off his morbid mood, and plunged into Scarlatti's Sonata in A, his fingers frolicking all over the board, bent on a dominating exhibition of technique. As he stopped, there was a storm of hand-clapping. Rozenoffski gave a masterly start of surprise, and turned his leonine head in dazed bewilderment. Was he not then ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... are looking to-night," he said. "I shall have to paint your portrait all over again, and you must wear that gown, and we will call it, 'A Moonlight Sonata,' and ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... Stephen; my second, 'The Body Snatchers,' is laid aside in a justifiable disgust, the tale being horrid; my third, 'The Merry Men,' I am more than half through, and think real well of. It is a fantastic sonata about the sea and wrecks; and I like it much above all my other attempts at story-telling; I think it is strange; if ever I shall make a hit, I have the line now, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a beautiful song-melody with an artistic accompaniment, so arranged that all can be played upon the piano, you will understand what the third style is. It is wonderfully free, surely; sometimes proceeding in full free chords, as in the opening measures of the B flat Sonata of Beethoven,[49] again running away from all freedom back to the old style, until the picture looks as old as a monkish costume ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... hour had passed and Sir Victor did not return. Edith still remained at the piano, the gleam of the candles falling upon her thoughtful face, playing the weird "Moonlight Sonata." She played so softly that the shrill whistling of the wind around the gables, the heavy soughing of the trees, was plainly audible above it. Ten minutes more, and her lover did not return. Wondering a little what the telegram could contain, she arose and ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... German towns there are certain streets where one side, for reasons no one can explain, is taboo at certain hours of the day; not of the night, but of the day. You may go to a music shop at midday to buy a sonata, and find, if you are a girl, that you have committed a crime. The intercourse between young people outside their homes is hedged round with convention. German titles of address are so absurdly formal that Germans laugh at them themselves. Their ceremonies in connection with anniversaries ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... 13th and following bars of the Crescendo in the Largo Appassionato of Beethoven's Op. 2. Or if you wish to have an example where all is exception, like one of the south nave windows in York Minster, the opening of the "Sonata Appassionata," Op. 57. ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... the poor peasant parvenu when he heard his charming Cesarine play a sonata by Steibelt or sing a ballad; when he saw her writing French correctly, or making sepia drawings of landscapes, or listened while she read aloud from the Racines, father and son, and explained the beauties of the poetry. What happiness it was for him to live again in this fair, innocent ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... for Schroth at the Kleines in Berlin, for Feraudy at the Comedie Francaise, for Skinner at the Knickerbocker—and it was stentorian applause and sincere—but I have never heard applause like the applause of the audience of these drabber halls. The thunders of the storm king are as a sonata against the staggering artillery of approbation when Pharnel of the Montparnasse sings "C'est pas difficile"; the howlings of the north wind are as zephyrs against the din of eulogy when Marius Reybas of the Bobino lifts a mighty larynx in "Mahi ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... real love of art and did not understand it. I went to concerts, but the only part of a sonata or symphony which took hold of me was that which was melodious. The long passages with no striking theme in them conveyed nothing to me, and as to Bach, excepting now and then, his music was like a skilful recitation of nonsense verses. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... go home, and put the finishing touch to my sonata for the piano-forte; but it is not yet eleven o'clock, and, withal, a beautiful summer night. I will lay any wager, that, at my next-door neighbour's, (the Oberjagermeister,) the young ladies are sitting at the window, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... supported from beginning to end by an extremely familiar formula of arpeggio accompaniment, consequently known as the Alberti bass. He thus shows how advanced was the decay ofpolyphonic sensibility (as a negative preparation for the advent of the sonata-style) already during the lifetime of Bach. His works have no other special qualities, though it is probable that Mozart's first violin sonatas, written at the age of seven, were modelled on Alberti in spite of their ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... return an hour later to find the discussion approaching a close. Or, if he had no business to attend to, he would go for a walk on the Mall, whence he commanded the lovely panorama of the Loire valley, and take a draught of fresh air while his wife was performing a sonata in ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... "Moonlight Sonata". A trained musical critic would probably have found much to cavil at in his rendering of the piece, but it was undoubtedly good for a public school player. Of course he was encored. The gallery would have encored him if he had played ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... orchestra; and there is a kindred absurdity involved in setting the orchestra above that mighty union of orchestra, organ, and voices which we get in the oratorio. When the reason alleged for ranking the symphony above the oratorio leads us likewise to rank the sonata above the symphony, we seem to have ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... finish of the sonata we all applauded Cleopatra just as loudly as we could, in the hope that she would faint with surprise and stop playing, but ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... eyes slid round again, watching her other neighbour and the girl. A violinist had begun to play the Cesar Franck Sonata. It was Pierson's favourite piece of music, bringing him, as it were, a view of heaven, of devotional blue air where devout stars were shining in a sunlit noon, above ecstatic trees and waters where ecstatic ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... melody entitled "Alsace" well represents the temper of the words—and in name links the nationalities of writer and composer. It is a choral arranged from a sonata of the great Ludwig von Beethoven, born in Bonn, Germany, 1770, and died in Vienna, Mar. 1827. Like the author of the hymn he felt the hand of affliction, becoming totally deaf soon after his fortieth ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... do you think we might vary that noble masterpiece with a waltz?" Can we blame the poor fellow? Wagner represents a noise to him, and the awful scorn and despair of the first movement in the "Moonlight Sonata" only lead him to say, "Heavy play with that left hand. Can't he go faster over the treble, or whatever they call it?" He wants intelligible musical ideas, and we have no right to begin "level-raising" with the unhappy and remonstrant man. The music halls in London are now under strict supervision, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... afternoon he had been practising with fury; first scales, then exercises. Then a pause; and now, his fingers slipped into the first movement of the Waldstein Sonata. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... huge Hebrew tome on the piano and puts it down with a slight smile as if overwhelmed by the weight of alien antiquity. Then she goes over to the desk and picks up the printed music.] Mendelssohn's Concerto, Tartini's Sonata in G Minor, Bach's Chaconne... [She looks up at the book-rack.] "History of the American Commonwealth," "Cyclopaedia of History," "History of the Jews"—he seems very fond of history. Ah, there's Shelley and Tennyson. [With surprise] Nietzsche next to ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... It was the "Moonlight Sonata" that Helen was playing. "It's a pretty piece," observed Lige after a time. John could have choked him, but he answered: "Yes, it ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... I stand at E's, and I therefore proceed with a sonata in F, composed, not by Beethoven, but by a horse-breaker, with certain amplifications of my own: "The young horse was in famous fettle, and framed splendidly over the flakes; but he seemed all of a flabber-gaster when ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Chopin composed between his twelfth and seventeenth years at the house of General Sowinski's wife in the course of "a few quarter-hours." The Variations sur un air national allemand were published after the composer's death along with his Sonata, Op. 4, by Haslinger, of Vienna, in 1851. They are, no doubt, the identical composition of which Chopin in a letter from Vienna (December 1, 1830) writes: "Haslinger received me very kindly, but nevertheless ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... climbing brought me near enough to get my glass on the little lyrist, and then I found it was only the house-wren! "How could you be led astray by so familiar a song?" you inquire. Well, that is the humiliating part of the incident, for I have been listening to the house-wren's gurgling sonata for some twenty years—rather more than less—and should have recognized it at once; only it must be remembered that I was in a strange place, and had my ears and eyes set for avian rarities, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... was willing to do any thing to prove her gratitude, after the invaluable hint which she had just received. At the second trial the fair pianist's eye and hand were in perfect harmony. The lovely melody which the Adagio of Mozart's Fifteenth Sonata has given to violin and piano flowed smoothly at last—and Julius Delamayn soared to the seventh heaven ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... b hopelessly ignorant of music; c keeping silence while the Moonlight-Sonata is being played; d really ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... rhythmic pulses | | which come most naturally to us are in twos and threes and | | their multiples; while even to beat time in fives requires a | | special effort. In music 5/8 or 5/4 time is extremely rare. | | There is an example of the latter in Chopin's Sonata I (the | | ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... were, Sanya's. Her technique was not perhaps all that it might have been; she might not have won the Gold Medal of our white-shirted academies, but she had enough temperament to make half a dozen Steinway Hall virtuosi. From valse to nocturne, from sonata to prelude, her fancy ran. With crashing chords she dropped from "L'Automne Bacchanale" to the Nocturne in E flat; scarcely murmured of that, then tripped elvishly into Moszkowsky's Waltz, and from that ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... not very much. His Narrative is drowned in beautiful seas of description and reflection; has neither dates nor references; and advances at an intolerable rate of slowness; in fact, rather turns on its axis than advances; produces on you the effect of a melodious Sonata, not of a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to light valuable inspirations, we have only to subtract from it the dream disguise as a feat of dream-work and a mark of assistance from obscure forces in the depth of the mind (cf. the devil in Tartini's sonata dream). The intellectual task as such must be attributed to the same psychic forces which perform all such tasks during the day. We are probably far too much inclined to over-estimate the conscious character even of intellectual ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... After playing a sonata, Mdlle. d'O—— asked me if I would go to a concert. I replied that, being in her company, nothing could make me stir. "But would you, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... authority, described Emily's income as falling short even of two hundred a year. Having made that disheartening reply, he opened another music book. "You know this sonata, of course?" he said. The next moment, the violin was under his ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... subject to suit all moods—too much like a brass band always playing in the room. The easel picture had to be without too definite a subject, and could no more permit being translated into words than a sonata. Some of Giovanni Bellini's late works are already of this kind. They are full of that subtle, refined poetry which can be expressed in form and colour alone. But they were a little too austere in form, a little too ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... that mood left her. In the dim candle-light her eyes were tender again. Very softly she played the first two movements of the "Moonlight" sonata. ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... tired, and with all the dear instruments intact, unharmed by rough hands of porters and Custom House officers, that, one of these days, in three or four months, when I am well, I look forward to contributing the viola da gamba part of a sonata to the concert of the old instrumental music which he will give when he has put his choir in order: you know I used to play that instrument in my young days. A more innocent wish never entered into the heart of a human being, you will say, yet this letter causes me many qualms, for I cannot ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... claim to reproduce the individuality which characterizes the handwriting of myriads of different persons. Personality, then, is the virtuoso's one great unassailable stronghold. It is personality that makes us want to hear a half dozen different renderings of a single Beethoven sonata by a half dozen different pianists. Each has the charm and flavor of ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... for the thousandth time he experienced the artistic satisfaction of the connoisseur in collegiate architecture, and mentally limned the remainder of the plan. His sensations were like those of a skilled musician who has heard the first movement of a masterly sonata and is left to imagine the perfect whole. The sun, now mounting toward the zenith, was shortening the shadows of the tower on the slate roof that shone in the bright atmosphere like dull silver. Not a student was in sight, and the place seemed to share ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Coda! If the art of today has made no progress in fugue, song, sonata, symphony, quartet, oratorio, opera [who has improved on Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert? Name! name! I say], what is the use of talking about "the average of today being higher"? How higher? You mean more people go to concerts, more people enjoy ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... violinist, composed his "Devil's Sonata'' under the inspiration of a dream. Coleridge, through dream influence, composed his ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... the piano-forte, composed by J. B. Cramer, fame speaks largely. An eminent connoisseur and reviewer speaks of it in these words: "We here recognise the genuine style of J. B. Cramer—this is really a grand sonata. It consists of three different movements, each so excellent in its kind, that it is difficult to decide which ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... where?—at the festive tea-table, to be sure, by the side of Miss Higgs, sipping the bohea, or tasting the harmless muffin; while old Mrs. Higgs looks on, pleased at their innocent dalliance, and my friend Miss Wirt, the governess, is performing Thalberg's last sonata in treble X., totally unheeded, at ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... latest and most atrocious outrage on good taste in this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as "the Hammerklavier." All musicians of finer feeling should unite to kill ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... nerve-destroying, bilious age. He is still known as "Papa Haydn," and the name, to use Carlyle's phrase, is "significant of much." In the history of the art his position is of the first importance. He was the father of instrumental music. He laid the foundations of the modern symphony and sonata, and established the basis of the modern orchestra. Without him, artistically speaking, Beethoven would have been impossible. He seems to us now a figure of a very remote past, so great have been the changes in the world of music since he lived. But his ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... art too much to be gratified by undeserved applause. I felt sorry for her, and should have liked to say a few encouraging words, but the continued cheering did not permit her to leave the platform. She sat down again and played Beethoven's Sonata in cis-moll, which was not on the programme. There is, I believe, no composition in the whole world that shows with the same distinctness the soul torn by tragic conflict; especially in the third part of the Sonata, the Presto-agitato. ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Dormer Colville had said to his cousin. And at length Turner succumbed to the soft effect of a sonata. He even snored in the shade of a palm, and the gaiety of the proceedings in ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... a certain dignity. He was aware that every tongue in the place was stilled, that every ear was tuned to catch each note of this fantastic quartet,—a sonata appassionata in which vibrated the souls of men and women. He looked from Millicent's pallid face to the faces of the listeners, some of whom made pretense of polite indifference, while others did not scruple to exhibit their eager delight. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... railway traverses. Thus, when I tried to procure from him "Ramona" in California, or "The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains" in Tennessee, or "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" in Ohio, or "The Grandissimes" near New Orleans, the nearest he could come to my modest demand was "The Kreutzer Sonata" or the last effort of Miss Laura Jean Libbey, a popular American novelist, who describes in glowing colours how two aristocratic Englishmen, fighting a duel near London somewhere in the seventies, were interrupted by the heroine, who drove between them in a hansom ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... it was with the most delighted cordiality on the part of both. "Mein lieber Herr," Thrum would say (with some malice), "your sonata in x flat is divine." "Chevalier," Baroski would reply, "dat andante movement in w is worthy of Beethoven. I gif you my sacred honour," and so forth. In fact, they loved each other as gentlemen in their ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... who brought it in—when It came in, Dick, who pretends to be abashed upon such occasions, gave one swift glance upward and then emitted a long, low, expressive whistle. When Beethoven found himself throbbing with undescribable emotions he composed a sonata; when Keats felt odd things stirring within him he wrote an ode to an urn, but my friend Dick, quite as evidently on fire with his emotions, merely whistled—and then looked around evidently embarrassed lest he should have infringed upon the ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... me'; there is no next, you young fool." Then he went in to his piano and caressed the keys till they yielded their ineffable sweetness in the half-sad tones of Handel's "Messiah"; afterward, to lift his spirits, they gave him a glittering sonata from Mozart. But it is better to feel than to think. It is sweeter to weep than to laugh. So when he was tired of the classics, he played over and over again, in weird, minor, improvised variations, his love ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... the letter. His head was in a whirl. He only half heard the notes of the tutor's sonata as they rose and fell on his ear. Presently, with beating ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... that the ignorance of this music among piano teachers and students is a crying shame. What modern piano sonata have we to-day, to compare with his? I know of none. And the songs—are they not wonderful! I love the man and his music so much that I am doing what lies in my power to make these compositions better known. ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... any one who looked at my song "Man in Vain" in Ulysses might think it was taken from "Batti, batti." I should like to say it was taken from, or suggested by, a few bars in the opening of Beethoven's pianoforte sonata op. 78, and a few bars in the accompaniment to the duet "Hark how the Songsters" in Purcell's Timon of Athens. I am not aware of having borrowed more in the song than what follows as natural development of these two passages which ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... his head, strikes the massive opening chords of a Beethoven sonata. There is a sudden hush and each note is heard clearly. The tempo of the first movement, which begins after a grand pause, is allegro con brio, and the first subject is given out in a sparkling cascade of sound. But, ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... poetic thought, that comes to us like a homing bird from out the mystery of the blue sky—we put this confiding stranger straightway into that iron bed, the "sonata form," or perhaps even the third rondo form, for we have quite an assortment. Should the idea survive and grow too large for the bed, and if we have learned to love it too much to cut off its feet and thus make it fit (as did that old robber of Attica), ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... simplicity of her home life. This beautiful girl, in her quaint Norwegian costume, was able to give tranquilly her opinion on the deepest scientific subjects, or seat herself at the piano, and play with consummate skill a sonata of Beethoven. But her greatest charm was the absence of all pretension, and her perfectly natural manners. She no more thought of being vain of her talents, or of making any display of them, than she did of blushing on account of her rural costume. She bloomed like some wild flower, that, ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... no doubt a tenant of the shelf in some favorite publisher's shop]; and Mr. Norris's Poem on Friendship, a work, which I doubt, though honored with a ghost's approbation, we may now seek for as vainly as Correlli tormented his memory to recover the sonata which the devil played to him in a dream. Presently after, from former habits we may suppose, the guest desires a cup of tea; but, bethinking herself of her new character, escapes from her own proposal by recollecting that Mr. Bargrave was in the habit ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... sing his song again; but he protested that he did not wish to torture the ears of the musical German, and suggested to Lisa that they should attack Beethoven's sonata. Then Marya Dmitrievna heaved a sigh, and in her turn suggested to Gedeonovsky a walk in the garden. "I should like," she said, "to have a little more talk, and to consult you about our poor Fedya." Gedeonovsky bowed with a smirk, and with two fingers picked up his hat, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... reception she met as she played Schubert's Sonata, followed by the march from "Lenore," the latter seeming to strike the chord of popular approval in a very ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... the orange tie remained in his place, disputing whether the body had not something or other which he called its legitimate claims. And from that they came back by way of the Kreutzer Sonata and ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... followed the clue, and soon he was at the gate of a villa, almost buried in the bosk, and listening with all his critical attention to a thrilling performance—yes, thrilling was the word—of Chopin's music. What! The last movement of the B flat minor sonata, the funeral march sonata, but no more like the interpretation he had heard from ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... can't serve the Lord better than by singing beautiful songs to the weary people of this earth. To wear out a voice like that on pinchbeck hymn tunes is a crime." Then, as if becoming conscious of a neglect of the girl, he added: "Now that you are in the mood, Miss Lambert, you must try that sonata again." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of justice and benevolence; as the musician who would care less to play a sonata of Beethoven's finely in solitude than in public, where he was to be paid for it, is wanting in ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Four of the best pianoforte players in the school were to hammer out an intensely noisy version of the overture to Zampa, arranged for eight hands on two pianos. The crack singer was to sing 'Una voce,' and Ida Palliser was to play the 'Moonlight Sonata.' ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... whistled, hummed tunes, gone accurately through the whole of Beethoven's Sonata in B, to let him know that I was within hearing, but he never ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata, called Appassionata. There is one here who plays that, and because it tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Messiah, "always maestoso, written in D flat major." In his fourth symphony he expressed musically the destiny of Napoleon; in the ninth symphony he tries to give a proof of the existence of God. By the side of a dead friend, in a room draped in black, he improvises the adagio of the sonata in C sharp minor. The biographers of Mendelssohn relate analogous instances of transposition under musical form. During a storm that almost engulfed George Sand, Chopin, alone in the house, under the influence of his agony, and half unconsciously, composed one of his Preludes. The case of Schumann ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... little fellow," he said, "I played at a reception at a Russian count's, and, for an urchin of seven, I flatter myself that I swung through Beethoven's 'Kreutzer Sonata' ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... civilization. The Goths and Visigoths were models of cleanliness and avatars of intelligence compared with a majority of the seventy different breeds of bipedal brutes who acknowledge the rule of the Romanoffs. A Russian peasant smells like the Chicago river on a summer's day, or Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata." He's more disagreeable to the olfactories than old John Jacob Astor's hide house, from whose effluvia sprung the master spirits of Gotham's Four Hundred. He will eat what would send a coyote howling out of the country. To him a jug of train-oil were as angel-food, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the laird?' said Willie, interrupting a sonata of Corelli, of which he had whistled several bars ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... up and used it freely. Nothing is so destructive in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone can say "Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable charge, and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the editor," said Hugh, hastening on with his task as the laughter subsided. "Here, my friends is another design. When you see a hand proportioned in careful outlines, beautiful, but also firm; white, but also strong to the playing of a sonata, you may know the owner will be prompt, even-tempered and calm; you may know the owner will be such a one as—" here Hugh held up another design; "Sibyl!" said the audience, as the ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March |
