"Mozart" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... played the Concerto of Mozart in his masterful manner. One wonders how he can have any command over the keyboard, he has such short arms and such a ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... like all other pianists, was a German. A German, like the eminent Liszt and the great Mendelssohn, and Steibelt, and Dussek, and Meyer, and Mozart, and Doelher, and Thalberg, and Dreschok, and Hiller, and Leopold Hertz, Woertz, Karr, Wolff, Pixis, and Clara Wieck—and all Germans, generally speaking. Schmucke was a great musical composer doomed to remain a music master, so utterly did his character lack ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... is merely pretty and flashy. There are some bits of Handel that have great power over the girl; she listens to them, I might almost say, devoutly, and is never weary. Madge is delighted with Rossini; but Lois gives her adherence to the German classics, and when I play Haydn or Mozart or Mendelssohn, stands rapt in her delighted listening, and looking like—well, I will not tantalize you by trying to describe to you what I see every day. I marvel only where the girl got these tastes and susceptibilities; it must be blood; I believe in inheritance. She has ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... every one of them. What, I wondered, did she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day I knew, and her musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain melodies of Verdi's. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house she used to sit by my cot in the evening—when the cool, night wind blew ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... mightiest oratorio, which is one mountain range of sublime choruses, will be the chief subject of study. It is proposed to give at least four Sunday-evening performances, consisting of "The Messiah," of course, at Christmas; Costa's "Eli," or "Elijah"; the "Requiem" of Mozart, and the "Lobgesang" by Mendelssohn; and for the last, and we trust many last, "Israel in Egypt." All this will be but so much rehearsal for the grander Festival to follow. We have no organized orchestral or symphony society, as we should have; but we have with us always the elements ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... importance of all lovers of art being able to form their own opinions is obvious, when we consider that our musical public is obliged to take everything on trust. For instance, if we read on one page of some history (every history of music has such a page) that Mozart's sonatas are sublime, that they do not contain one note of mere filigree work, and that they far transcend anything written for the harpsichord or clavichord by Haydn or his contemporaries, we echo the saying, and, if necessary, quote the "authorities." Now if one had occasion to read ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... writer argues, from a comparison of the pictures of Raphael, Rubens, and modern French artists, that the idea of beauty is not absolutely the same even throughout Europe: see the 'Lives of Haydn and Mozart,' by Bombet (otherwise M. Beyle), English translation, p. 278.); and then unconscious selection would come into action through the more powerful and leading men preferring certain women to others. Thus the differences between the tribes, at first very slight, would gradually ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... feeling, but no declamation, no passionate appeal, no superficial and feigned emotion. It was simple colloquy—a gentleman conversing. Unconsciously and surely, the ear and heart were charmed. How was it done? Ah! how did Mozart do it, how Raphael? The secret of the rose's sweetness, of the bird's ecstacy, of the sunset's glory—that is the secret ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... "good old" time is past, it sang itself out in Mozart—how happy are WE that his ROCOCO still speaks to us, that his "good company," his tender enthusiasm, his childish delight in the Chinese and its flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his longing for the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, and his belief ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to appropriate, what dramatic writer, in our own experience or history, has been greeted with such homage as that paid to Handel, when the king and people of England stood up in trembling awe to hear his Hallelujah chorus?—that which hailed Mozart from the enraptured theatres of Prague when listening to his greatest operas?—that which fanned into new fire the dying embers of Haydn's spirit, when the Creation was performed at Vienna, to delight his declining days, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... exact proportion as the exciting cause approaches perfection—according as the beauty heard or seen or felt approaches the heavenly keynote. A simple ballad awakens a quiet pleasure, while the magnificent symphonies of Beethoven or Mozart fill the soul with a rapture with which the former feeling is no more to be compared than the brooklet with the ocean; for the latter is inexpressibly nearer ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... January it was 150 years since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born. A grandmaster of music, a magician who leads the soul from the depths of life to its sunary heights. Mozart transposed life into music, Wagner and his pupils transposed problems of life. Wagner questions and receives no answer. Mozart affirms life. His "Don Juan" liberates, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... above all as Mozart's librettist, and whose youth much resembled that of Casanova, was accused of having eaten ham on Friday and was obliged to flee from Venice in 1777, to escape the punishment of the Tribunal of Blasphemies. In his Memoirs, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... pleasure. They praised the by-gone things, they took a sentimental, childish delight in the achieved perfections of the past. Particularly they liked the late eighteenth century, the period of Goethe and of Shelley, and Mozart. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... trained at length under the tuition of the most illustrious of his predecessors, Bach and Haendel; revealed the most wonderful musical talent; quitted Bonn and settled in Vienna; attracted the attention of Mozart; at the age of 40 was attacked with deafness that became total and lasted for life; continued to compose all the same, to the admiration of thousands; during his last days was a prey to melancholy; during a thunderstorm he died. Goethe pronounced him at his best ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is by careless artists who pay little attention to the verbal significance of what they are singing, it would sound absurd, because the poetic phrasing is entirely ignored. The correct way of performing the passage (from the aria "Voi che sapete," in Act II of Mozart's Nozze di ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... establish that universal relation which he has seen, a universal relation of feeling. And to him, in his effort, there is neither time nor space. Mankind are not here or there or of this moment or of that; they are everywhere and for ever. The voice in Mozart's music is itself a universal voice speaking to the universe of universal things. And all art is an acting of the beauty that has been experienced, a perpetuation of it so that all men may share it for ever. The artist's effort is to be the sunset he has seen, to eternalize ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... of the suffering which it indicates. A fretful or peevish cry cannot by any efforts make itself impassioned. The cry of impatience, of hunger, of irritation, of reproach, of alarm, are all different—different as a chorus of Beethoven from a chorus of Mozart. But if ever you saw an infant suffering for an hour, as sometimes the healthiest does, under some attack of the stomach, which has the tiger-grasp of the Oriental cholera, then you will hear moans that address ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... his music. Thus in February, 1820: "Our music club at St. John's has been offered, and has accepted, the music-room, for our weekly private concerts;" and later: "I went to the R's to play the difficult first violin to Haydn, Mozart, &c.;"[10] and in June, 1820: "I was asked by a man yesterday to go to his rooms for a little music at seven o'clock. I went. An old Don—a very good-natured man but too fond of music—played bass, and through his enthusiasm I was kept playing quartets on a heavy tenor from seven to twelve. ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... The Mozart was like an idyll after a farcical melodrama. They played it with an astounding delicacy. Through the latter half of the movement I could hear Mr Brindley breathing regularly and heavily through his nose, exactly as though he were being hypnotized. I had a tickling sensation in the small ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... courteous and indefatigable polyglot and active of impresarios, with the good-natured Gosche, heralding a troupe of all the stars, D'Angri, Hinckley, Kellogg, Brignoli, Susini, and all the rest, including divers new singing birds. Maretzek has led, and we have had a range from Mozart to Verdi, which was, on the whole, well-chosen. We have had Brignoli singing, if possible, better, and acting, if possible, worse than usual—a nightingale imprisoned in a pump; Mme. D'Angri, with her embonpoint ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to you," returns Mr. Bucket, squeezing his hand. "You're a friend in need. A good tone, mind you! My friend is a regular dab at it. Ecod, he saws away at Mozart and Handel and the rest of the big-wigs like a thorough workman. And you needn't," says Mr. Bucket in a considerate and private voice, "you needn't commit yourself to too low a figure, governor. I don't want to pay too large a price for my friend, but I want you to have your proper percentage and ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... 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 variations; and whether the diffused musical powers of the Bach clan, culminating in ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Art's two highest 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 less than the thing interpreted. Face to face with a joy, a sorrow, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... from Allegro,' said Helena, pointing with her bow to the place on Louisa's score of the Mozart sonata. Louisa obediently took the chords, and ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... as an instrumentalist he took delight in hearing music, and was always an appreciative yet critical listener to what was good and tuneful. His favourite composers were Mendelssohn—whose Lieder he was specially fond of[1]—Chopin, and Mozart. He heard Gounod's Faust whilst he was in Paris, and confesses to having been quite overcome with the beauty of the music. 'I couldn't bear it,' he says, in one of his letters, 'and gave in completely. The composer must be a very remarkable ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... said, that the most flying wits must have three wings—art, meditation, exercise. Genius is in the instinct of flight. A boy came to Mozart, wishing to compose something, and inquiring the way to begin. Mozart told him to wait. "You composed much earlier?" "But asked nothing about it," replied the musician. Cowper expressed the same sentiment to a friend: "Nature gives men a bias to their respective pursuits, and that strong propensity, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... that successful stupidity, although secretly despised, was often the master of the people, while a genius with the wisdom of the ages, starved at the castle gate, and like Mozart and Otway, found rest ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Nicholas is credited with the saying: "Je pourrais en finir des Polonais si je venais a bout des Polonaises."] They remind Heine of the tenderest and loveliest flowers that grow on the banks of the Ganges, and he calls for the brush of Raphael, the melodies of Mozart, the language of Calderon, so that he may conjure up before his readers an Aphrodite of the Vistula. Liszt, bolder than Heine, makes the attempt to portray them, and writes like an inspired poet. No Pole can speak on this subject without ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... . Ah, I should like to hear Fidelio again, often as I have heard it. I do not find so much 'Melody' in it as you do: understanding by Melody that which asserts itself independently of Harmony, as Mozart's Airs do. I miss it especially in Leonora's Hope song. But, what with the story itself, and the Passion and Power of the Music it is set to, the Opera is one of those that one can hear ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Mozart, the great musician, wrote a sonata when he was four years old and an opera in his eighth year. Theresa Milanolla played the violin with such skill that many people thought that she must have played before her birth. There are many such instances of wonderful powers ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... He changed his riding-clothes for the evening dress of modern civilization, and went at once to the drawing-room. Here all was luxury, nothing to suggest the privations of a new country. A thick red carpet covered the floor, red arras the walls; the music of Mozart and Beethoven was on the grand piano. The furniture was rich and comfortable, the large carved table was covered with French novels ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... is soft but poignant. Some songs—the "Adelaide," for example—are songs to make one commit suicide. But this sort of music stirs and delights while it mocks with the sweetness which soothes us not. "She kept me awake all night, as a strain of Mozart's might do," Keats wrote of his Charmian. There was no song this special songstress sang which she did not make her own by a peculiar and powerful effort. Her instinct was to rouse, charm, fascinate her little audience. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... infallibility, but inspiration is authority. The inspired man is always an authority. Phidias and Michael Angelo are authorities in sculpture; Titian and Rafaelle are authorities in painting; Mozart and Beethoven in music; and Paul, John, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of this country. So far as intellectual gifts are concerned, he is not, of course, to be named in the same breath with a man like Burke, for example; one might as well think of comparing Offenbach with Mozart or Handel. But the influence of the career of Pulteney on the English Parliament is nevertheless more distinctly marked than the influence of the career of Burke. We are speaking now not of political thought—no man ever made a greater ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... on, pausing in Vienna to hear the opera—Max had always intended to spend a vacation with him in Vienna, listening to Mozart, and Alan felt he owed it to Hawkes to pay his respects. The operas he saw were ancient, medieval in fact, better than two thousand years old; he enjoyed the tinkly melodies but found some of the plots ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... outline of the story as told by Tirso de Molina in "El Burlador de Sevilla o el Convidado de Piedra." The same theme has been treated by Molire, Goldoni, Mozart, Byron, and Zorrilla, to mention but a few of the hundreds of writers who have utilized it. In the hands of non-Spanish writers the character of Don Juan loses the greater part of its essential nobility. To them Don Juan is the type of libertine and little more. He was a prime ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... went early the next Sunday to St. Anne's Church, and sat down in the side gallery at its east end. While the congregation flowed quietly in, the organist played the Agnus Dei of Mozart. Those pious tender tones stole over his hot young heart, and whispered, "Peace, be still!" He sighed wearily, and it passed through his mind that it might have been better for him, and especially for his studies, if he had never seen her. Suddenly ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... mouth of Aristippus, a semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard. But in the land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as kindness: this tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work, but ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... confine himself to the comfortable vulgarity of popular airs. He played selections from Handel, Mozart, Wagner, and I don't know whom; while the time passed unnoticed by both of us. At length he laid the violin across his knees, and, after a pause, his voice rose in one of the sweetest songs ever woven from words. And ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... silvery light and delicate; the pervading sentiment more touched with the ideal; compared with Juliet, she is like a Guido hung beside a Georgione, or one of Paesiello's airs heard after one of Mozart's. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... the date of Salomon's visit. Haydn had been strongly drawn towards the young musician ever since the time, five years before, when, after listening to one of Mozart's quartets, he had delighted the heart of Leopold Mozart by declaring that his son was the greatest composer he had ever heard. Mozart's affection for Haydn was equally warm, and now, on hearing that the latter contemplated a journey to England, he tried to persuade ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... thought and feeling into a rapt, unearthly repose; and the balmy quiet, that deepened ever with the deepening light, seemed to hover over us with a gentler influence still, when there stole upon it from the piano the heavenly tenderness of the music of Mozart. It was an evening of sights and sounds never ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... composer and the listener. We sigh with Bellini in the finale of La Somnambula; we shudder with Weber in the sublime phantasmagoria of Der Freischutz; the mystic inspirations of Palestrina, the masses of Mozart, transport us to the celestial regions, toward which they rise like a melodious incense. Music awakens in us reminiscences, souvenirs, associations. When we have wept over a song, it ever after seems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... afflictive moment. From the battle hymns of the Confederacy to the militant revival melodies best loved by Martha Gordon the transition was easy; and from these she drifted through a Beethoven sonata to Mozart, and from Mozart ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... you are not, Phil," said Kirkwood. "What you were trying to whistle is the 'Lucia Sextette' upside down. Rose, let's have the 'Mozart Minuet' we used to play. We haven't had it ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... between the two arts. "Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he would speak extravagantly forever," says Thoreau. Perhaps music is the art of speaking extravagantly. Herbert Spencer says that some men, as for instance Mozart, are so peculiarly sensitive to emotion ... that music is to them but a continuation not only of the expression but of the actual emotion, though the theory of some more modern thinkers in the philosophy of art doesn't always bear this out. However, there is no doubt that in its nature music ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... the year 1787 Mozart and his wife undertook a journey to Prague, where he was to finish and bring ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... this wondrous symphony, this beautiful Mozart fantasia, and if you listen, you can hear the strains of the great beautiful melodies wafted now east, now west, now north, now south, rising to great climaxes, falling back to great chords of harmony, or, in an allegro movement, causing ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... all-compelling strength; the other draws us by his alluring charm. Michael Angelo is in painting what Dante and Shakespeare are in poetry, and Beethoven in music; Raphael is like the gentle Spenser and the tender Mozart. Michael Angelo is thoroughly original; Raphael possessed a peculiarly receptive nature, that caught something from all with whom he came into close contact. Michael Angelo strove continually to grow; Raphael struggled for ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... is one of the most famous men in history—as a man more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart—because posterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most great artists live in what they did, and by that we know them; but what Leonardo did gets much of its life from what he was, or rather from what he is to us. Of all great men he is the most representative; ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... curtain rose on the fourth act of Don Giovanni. They were, fortunately, able to secure two orchestra-chairs. The stage was gorgeous; but what did they care for the singer on the boards, or the divine music of Mozart? Brevan took his opera-glasses out, and rapidly surveying the house, he had soon found what he was looking for. He touched Daniel with his elbow, and, handing him the glasses, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... discontented with his desultory life, began to long for some real and earnest work to go at, soul and body, and finally came to the wise conclusion that everyone who loved music was not a composer. Returning from one of Mozart's grand operas, splendidly performed at the Royal Theatre, he looked over his own, played a few of the best parts, sat staring at the busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... heart. Yet in what sense could that be true? For an infant not more than six years old, was it possible that the promises of life had been really blighted, or its golden pleasures exhausted? Had I seen Rome? Had I read Milton? Had I heard Mozart? No. St. Peter's, the "Paradise Lost," the divine melodies of "Don Giovanni," all alike were as yet unrevealed to me, and not more through the accidents of my position than through the necessity of my yet imperfect sensibilities. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... following morning they emerged unwillingly from the green, dark valley, and journeyed along the level highway to Frankfort, where in the evening they heard the glorious Don Giovanni of Mozart. Of all operas this was Flemming's favorite. What rapturous flights of sound! what thrilling, pathetic chimes! what wild, joyous revelry of passion! what a delirium of sense!—what an expression of agony and woe! all the feelings of suffering ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... true, as you say, Madame, that actions prove nothing. This thought is striking in an episode in the life of Don Juan, which was known neither to Moliere nor to Mozart, but which is revealed in an English legend, a knowledge of which I owe to my friend James Russell Lowell of London. One learns from it that the great seducer lost his time with three women. One was a bourgeoise: she was in love with her husband; the other was a nun: she would ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... waist of his daughter the Judge now went to his wife; they found Leonore with her; nor was ever a quartet of Mozart's more harmonious than that which ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... an unimpaired figure. You have also the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of mine that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40, Nature's object being to make him go to bed for several months. Sometimes Nature overdoes it: Schiller and Mozart died. Goethe survived, though he very nearly followed Schiller into the shades. I did the thing myself quite handsomely by spending eighteen months on crutches, having two surgical operations, and breaking my arm. I distinctly noticed that instead of my recuperation beginning when my breakdown ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... over to the organ, and performed some sacred music of Mozart and Beethoven. They then paused and looked round, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... declamation, no passionate appeal, no superficial and feigned emotion. It was simple colloquy—a gentleman conversing. Unconsciously and surely the ear and heart were charmed. How was it done?—Ah! how did Mozart do ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... sides of the gray-green river it was full of romance to him, romance colored all the more deeply by memory. Off there among those peaks the Arrow had first come for him and Lannes, while here the great Mozart had been born and lay buried. In remoter days Huns had swept through these passes, coming from Asian deserts ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his artless sentences and flowing descriptions. They prefer Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Mallock, and the euphuism of young Oxford, just as some people prefer a Dresden shepherdess to the Caryatides of the Erechtheum, pronounce Fielding to be low, and Mozart to be passe. As boys love lollipops, so these juvenile fops love to roll phrases about under the tongue, as if phrases in themselves had a value apart from thoughts, feelings, great conceptions, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... other great men mentioned in the above list—I mean the thieves, especially—we shall find that they all commenced very early: they showed a passion for their art, as little Raphael did, or little Mozart; and the history of Cartouche's knaveries ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... deplore the irremediable; yet no man, probably, has failed to mourn the fate of mighty poets, whose dawning gave the promise of a glorious day, but who passed from earth while yet the light that shone in them was crescent. That the world should know Marlowe and Giorgione, Raphael and Mozart, only by the products of their early manhood, is indeed a cause for lamentation, when we remember what the long lives of a Bach and Titian, a Michelangelo and Goethe, held in reserve for their maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade ourselves, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... They were dim of sight, and did not see how lovely the witches were. The stale, old, leering witches! Away with ye! I dare say you have painted your cheeks by this time; your wretched old songs are as out of fashion as Mozart, and it is all ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with sincere admiration, and called him the giant of music. Haydn wrote: "Whoever understands me knows that I owe much to Sebastian Bach, that I have studied him thoroughly and well, and that I acknowledge him only as my model." Mozart's unceasing research brought to light many of his unpublished manuscripts, and helped Germany to a full appreciation of this great master. In like manner have the other luminaries of music placed on record their sense of obligation to one whose name ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... and loved to listen to music while he was engaged in painting. His friends sometimes held an extemporaneous concert in his room, without preparation, programme, or audience. Think of listening to an andante of Mozart's, played in that room! "Music doubled her power, and painting seemed illuminated." Beethoven was his favorite composer; his lofty genius harmonized with, and satisfied the longings of, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... 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
... and she at once sat down before the little instrument. It was scarcely more to be compared with the magnificent machines of our day than the flageolets of Virgil's shepherds with the cornet-a-piston of the modern star performer, but Mozart, Haydn, Handel, or Beethoven never lived to see a better. It was only about two feet across by four and a half in width, with a small square sounding board at the end. The almost threadlike wires, strung on a wooden frame, gave forth a thin and tinny sound ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... 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, ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... agreement is to them as mere noise. Let us suppose ourselves present at a concert, in company with one such person and another who possesses what is called musical sensibility. How are they affected, for instance, by a piece of Mozart's? In the sense of hearing they are equal: look at them. In the one we perceive perplexity, annoyance, perhaps pain; he hears nothing but a confused medley of sounds. In the other, the whole being is rapt in ecstasy, the unutterable pleasure gushes from his eyes, he cannot ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... respecting the comparative excellencies of the German and Italian schools. Haydn introduced the variety and melody of the opera into the oratorio, of which his "Creation" is a standing proof. In the latter half of the foregoing century, sacred music has gradually yielded to the opera. Mozart brought the operatic style to perfection in the wonderful compositions that ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Italy, as during this time the Italians led all Europe in the arts. At a later period the clavichord was copied by the Germans and Belgians. It was used by them for centuries on account of its simple construction and low price. Mozart always carried one with him as part of his baggage when traveling. The virginal, spinet, and harpsichord followed the clavichord in rapid succession, considering that the last named instrument had been in favor for ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... 4. President, the Earl of Aylesford. The "Messiah" was given for the first time here with Mozart's accompaniments; part of the "Creation" &c. Mr. Thomas Vaughan was among the singers (and he took part in every Festival until 1840), and Signor Domenico Dragonetti (double bass) and the Brothers Petrules (horn players) with the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... greater number are piano music pure and simple. It is not a very rare occurrence for a new piece to have a sale of one hundred thousand copies in the United States. A composer who can produce the kind of music that pleases the greatest number, may derive a revenue from his art ten times greater than Mozart or Beethoven enjoyed in their most prosperous time. There are trifling waltzes and songs upon the list of Messrs. Ditson, which have yielded more profit than Mozart received for "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute" together. We learn from the catalogue just mentioned, that the composers of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... at Tipperusalem, Oklahoma, on the 15th of March, 1912, he has for parents a clerk in the Eagle Bakery and a Lithuanian laundress. He never touches meat, not even baked eagles, but subsists entirely on peaches and popcorn. He has been compared to MOZART, but the comparison is ridiculous, for MOZART was carefully trained by his father, and at the age of four was a finished executant. But it is quite otherwise with Tiny Titus, who knows no music, and yet by the sole power of his genius comprehends ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... worrying her he began to play: in the beginning not Beethoven nor Mozart, nor any of the classic music he most loved, but the Camp Fire songs, which he had lately arranged for the violin because of his interest in the Sunrise Hill Camp Fire girls, and which he was playing for the first time before ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... himself with almost every thing valuable in modern composition, is well known, as are also his works. It would be impossible to omit the name of Handel, the great thorough bass of musical composition, to whom Mozart confessed that every subsequent composer had been signally indebted. He is, by adoption and patronage, the property of the English school. It may not be unacceptable to add, that he composed, besides his other ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... through and over difficulties and prohibitions that for centuries have been supposed final. People like Wagner and Strauss and the rest seem so much sticky and insanitary mud next to these exquisite young ones, and so very old; and not old and wonderful like the great men, Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, but uglily old like a noisy old ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... Mainwaring's imagination may have been. The rest of our knowledge has to be built up from scattered documents of various kinds, helped out by the reminiscences of Dr. Burney and Sir John Hawkins. For the inner life of Mozart and Beethoven we can turn to copious letters and other personal writings; Handel's extant letters do not amount to more than about twenty in all, and it is only rarely that they throw much light on the workings ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... her head, she turned toward other guests—looked back—and with a last little courteous attention offered to him, said, "If you like music, Mr. Penrose, I advise you to go to the picture gallery. They are going to play a Quartet by Mozart." ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... things which you do not execute as well as your brother, man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar. By which last is meant—not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... unpleasant steps already; and often a wild hope sent him to the Salon des Etrangers only to lose his winnings afterwards at whist at the club. His life for the past two months had been like the immortal finale of Mozart's Don Giovanni; and of a truth, if a young man has come to such a plight as Victurnien's, that finale is enough to make him shudder. Can anything better prove the enormous power of music than that ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... Rogers visited him at Fonthill, and arrived at the gate, he was told that neither his servant nor his horses could be admitted, but that Mr. Beckford's attendants and horses would be at his service ('Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers', p. 217). Beckford had been taught music by Mozart, and Rogers says ('ibid'.) that "in the evening Beckford would amuse us by reading one of his unpublished works; or he would extemporize on the pianoforte, producing the most novel and ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... of an intellect can that be? You can assign to it no character in accordance with its acts. It is an intellect, if it be an intellect at all, which will swallow up a city, and will create the music of Mozart for me when I am weary; an intellect which brings to birth His Majesty King George IV., and the love of an affectionate mother for her child; an intellect which, in the person of a tender girl, shows an exquisite conscience, and in the ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... air for which I would disown Mozart's, Rossini's, Weber's melodies,— A sweet sad air that languishes and sighs, And keeps its secret ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... Caope exclaimed. "Talk about riveh ladies—theh's one. She owns Mozart Bend. Seventeen mile of Mississippi River's her'n, an' nobody but knows hit, if not to start with, then by the end. She stands theh, at the breech of her rifle, and, ho law, cayn't she shoot! She's real ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... bursting into leaf,—and Alwyn, whose every sense was pleasantly attuned to the small, as well as great, harmonies of nature, paused for a moment to listen to the luscious piping of the feathered minstrel, that in its own wild woodland way had as excellent an idea of musical variation as any Mozart or Chopin. Leaning against one of the park benches, with his back turned to the main thoroughfare, he did not observe the approach of a man's tall, stately figure, that, with something of his own light, easy, swinging step, had followed him rapidly along for some little distance, and that now halted ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered the world now, but only in his old age. Think of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, and of all the rebel musicians of to-day. But in the past the great artists, Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach, Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman world were not rebels. There they were like Michelangelo ...
— Progress and History • Various
... salutations with their host and his daughters, and moved toward the door. But Mr. Fitzgerald paused on the threshold to say, "Please play us out with Mozart's ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... instrument to rest in a too closely fitting case being often sufficient. Sometimes, on the reverse, it is from being in too large a one, getting well shaken while being taken home after some orchestral rehearsal; the joy of having mastered Mozart or battered Beethoven for an evening is turned in the morning to grief and vexation, when in response to the gentle persuasions of the bow there are but chatters and jarrings. Under such circumstances ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... l'hotel aux Trois Allies, vis-a-vis de la maison paternelle du celebre Mozart, lequel est nouvellement fourni et offre tous les comforts a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... of producing the utmost obtainable rent for the proprietor. If the twin flats and twin beds produce a guinea more than Shakespeare, out goes Shakespeare and in come the twin flats and the twin beds. If the brainless bevy of pretty girls and the funny man outbid Mozart, out goes Mozart. ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... because he feared their splendor would distract attention from and dim the glory of the Master himself. The hand that rounded St. Peter's dome reared it in adoration to Christ, and Raphael in painting the Transfiguration laid his masterpiece at the feet of this Child. Mozart there laid his symphonies, and Beethoven the works of his colossal genius. Shakespeare, "with the best brain in six thousand years," who has poured the many-colored splendors of his imagination over all our life, wrote in his will: "I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... adopted the "dying fall" of General Abercrombie's figure in St. Paul's as the model of his own. Some of the memorable scenes and votaries of the drama are directly associated with the sculptor's art,— as, for instance, the last act of "Don Giovanni," wherein the expressive music of Mozart breathes a pleasing terror in connection with the spectral nod of the marble horseman; and Shakspeare has availed himself of this art, with beautiful wisdom, in that melting scene where remorseful love pleads with the motionless heroine of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... proffered entertainment. The ladies of the family gave us music after the domestic muffin—and then, sir, a great idea occurred to me. You know how magnificently Miss Sherrick and the mother sing? Thy sang Mozart, sir. Why, I asked of Sherrick, should those ladies who sing Mozart to a piano, not ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was herself, and well accompanied, and gloriously responded to. But we have yet to hear her in the kind of music which seems to us most to need and to deserve such a singer—in the Agatha of Der Freyschutz, and in Mozart and the deep music of ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... has given the world such musicians as Wagner, Beethoven and Mozart," said he, "must possess in a tremendous degree the musical sense. The German knowledge of tone and its combinations is extraordinary; and their music in turn is as complex as their psychology and as simple as the ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... announcing angels, whose mission it is to whisper of greatness to great spirits, ever catch the infection of fallibility from their intercourse with mortals? Do the voices which said truly to Shakespeare, to Raphael, and to Mozart, in their youth-time,—You are chosen to be gods in this world—ever speak wrongly to souls which they are not ordained to approach? It may be so. There are men enough in all countries whose lives would seem to prove it—whose deaths have not ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... in the strict sense, but at the same time are sacred compositions written upon a large scale and usually performed by oratorio societies, such as Bach's "Passion Music" and "Magnificat," Berlioz's, Mozart's, and Verdi's Requiems, Mendelssohn's "Hymn of Praise," Handel's "Dettingen Te Deum," Schumann's "Paradise and the Peri," and ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... servant, a hack. He lived in Grub Street. He was only one degree above the sturdy vagrant and the escaped convict. Why was this? He had no money and he lived in an age when money was the fountain of respectability. Let me give you another instance: Mozart, whose brain was a fountain of melody, was forced to eat at table with coachmen, with footmen and scullions. He was simply a servant who was commanded to make music for a pudding-headed bishop. The same was true of the great painters, ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... chronological sequence, however, rather fits a collection aiming at instruction than at pleasure, and the Wisdom which comes through Pleasure:—within each book the pieces have therefore been arranged in gradations of feeling or subject. The development of the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven has been here thought of as a model, and nothing placed without careful consideration. And it is hoped that the contents of this Anthology will thus be found to present a certain unity, "as episodes," in the noble language of Shelley, "to that great Poem ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... He exemplified in a marked degree the truth that the typical modern music-maker touches hands with the whole body of culture and the humanities in a sense which would have been simply incredible to Mozart or Schubert. He was, intellectually, one of the most fully and brilliantly equipped composers in the history of musical art. He had read widely and curiously in many literatures, and the knowledge which he had acquired he applied to the ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... where it has a pyramidal form. In Mozart, Viotti, Turnsteg, Dussek, and Crescenti, where it is distinguished by a fullness and roundness of the lateral parts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... own account, undistracted by the romps around her. Dinner at six was followed by a short evening walk, after which she played with the children, or set them dancing indoors. She liked to sit at the piano, playing over to herself bits of music by her favorite Mozart, or old Spanish and Berrichon airs. After a game of dominoes or cards she would still sit up so late, occupying herself with water-color painting or otherwise, that sometimes her son was obliged to take away the lights. These long evenings, the same writer bears witness, sometimes ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... 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 was ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... Honour, Senator, Member of the Institut, Ingres died in 1869. Within a year of ninety, he was Dominique Ingres to the last, undertaking new works with the enthusiasm and vitality of Titian. A few days before his death he gave a musical party, favourite works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven being performed by skilled amateurs. His funeral was a veritable apotheosis, disciples, admirers and ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... until this time, however, that Chase felt that he could sit through a concert without being bored to extinction. He loved music, but not the kind that the royal orchestra rendered; Wagner, Chopin, Mozart were all the same to him—he hated them fervently and he was not yet given to stratagems and spoils. He sat at a table with the French attache just below the box occupied by the Princess and her party. In spite of the fact that he was a gentleman, born and bred, he could not conquer countless ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... that period, will perceive that they were composed for inflexible and unwieldy voices, possessing a large and heavy volume of tone, but incapable of executing any but simple passages, constructed according to an ascertained routine of intervals. Lord Mount-Edgcumbe truly conjectured, that Mozart was led to make the bass so prominent a part in the Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, by writing for a particular singer. The part of Figaro was, in fact, composed for Benucci. The sparkling brilliancy of Rossini would perhaps never have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... have given the Bosniacs a leader of energy and military talents. In that case, these men, instead of now wearing turbans in their grim feudal castles, might, frizzed and perfumed, be waltzing in pumps; and Shakespear and Mozart might now be delighting the citizens assembled in the ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... family of sane genius. He was eminently the painter of daylight and not a nocturnal visionary, as was Rembrandt. Shakespeare, who had all the strings to his lyre, had also many daylight moments. Mozart always sang them, and how blithely! No one, not Beethoven, not Raphael, not Goethe—to name three widely disparate men of genius—saw life as steadily as the Spaniard. He is a magnificent refutation of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... opera—people were so unaccustomed to the proprieties of the concert-room that the Easy Chair has even known some persons to whisper and giggle during the performance of the finest symphonies of Beethoven and Mozart, and so excessively rude as to rustle out of the hall before the last piece ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... followed them practically. His position, in reality, was that of a professor of mathematics. But music was his secret love. He not only knew the great masters, but he lived in them. He thought little of playing on the piano the whole of one of Mozart's operas, note for note, without any written music before him. I have often seen him do this. How much I have owed to those hours! How he could draw his hearers into the right mood! How he could illuminate the groping mind with the lightning flash ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... of two dogs that had been taught to sing, one of them taking a part with his master. Pierquin de Gembloux also speaks of a poodle that could run the scale in tune and sing very agreeably a fine composition of Mozart's My Heart It Sings at Eve." All the scientists in Paris, according to the same authority, went to see the dog belonging to Dr. Bennati, and hear it sing the scale, which it ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... "H'm! Mozart, Grieg, Chopin, Raff, Beethoven. Y'u ce'tainly have the music here; I wonder if y'u have the musician." He looked her over with a bold, unscrupulous gaze. "It's an old trick to have classical music on the rack and ragtime in your soul. Can y'u ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... not a born Nigger with mere appetite for pumpkin, should you have endured such a lot? I lament for you beyond all other expenses. Other expenses are light; you are the Cleopatra's pearl that should not have been flung into Mahogany's claret-cup. And Rossini, too, and Mozart and Bellini—Oh, Heavens, when I think that Music too is condemned to be mad and to burn herself, to this end, on such a funeral pile,—your celestial Opera-house grows dark and infernal to me! Behind its glitter stalks the shadow of Eternal ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... members of the Association found themselves "complimented" with tickets, and crowded in the chapel of Livingstone Hall, where Prof. Spence and the Mozart Society, of Fisk, treated us to an excellent rendering of Haydn's great oratorio, "The Creation." Many came over from the city, whites from "best families," all crowding in—listening, wondering, enjoying! How the music of those well-tuned instruments and voices caught us up and carried us ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 44, No. 5, May 1890 • Various
... pleasure to her at other times. But really it almost makes me as discontented with life as herself to hear her talk in unexcited hours. Turning over my books one day, she said, 'You can never be either a poet or a painter, or a Mozart or a philosopher, Hermione? what is the use of all your labour and poking?' What could I say? I felt myself colour up, and I laughed out, 'Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity!' Yet certainly God has set before us the things of earth ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... first row of stalls (most uncomfortable seats) who followed every note of the music, turning around and frowning at any unfortunate person in a box who dropped a fan or an opera-glass. It was funny to hear the hum of satisfaction when any well-known movement of Beethoven or Mozart was attacked. The orchestra was perfect, at its best I think in the "scherzos" which they took in beautiful style—so light and sure. I liked the instrumental part much better than the singing. French voices, the women's particularly, are thin, as a rule. I think they sacrifice ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... the entire journey, seated at the end of the tramcar he had kept his back turned on the other passenger: he seemed to be absorbed in watching the movements of the driver. At the end of the rue Mozart, where the rues La Fontaine, Poussin, des Perchamps meet, he had quitted the tram ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre |
