"Beethoven" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... histrio, the greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever had, our scenic artist par excellence. He belongs to some other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he must not be confounded. Wagner and Beethoven—this is blasphemy—and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man, he became a musician, he became a poet, because the tyrant in him, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... "Come, Mary," he said, "give us some music, now the urn has gone away. Play me that beautiful air of Beethoven, the one I call ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... breeds the trees Breeds cities too, and symphonies. Equally her beauty flows Into a savior, or a rose — Looks down in dream, and from above Smiles at herself in Jesus' love. Christ's love and Homer's art Are but the workings of her heart; Through Leonardo's hand she seeks Herself, and through Beethoven speaks In holy thunderings around The awful message ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... might be added songs of exaltation, such as Beethoven's "Nature's Adoration." Character songs, in which the singer assumes a character and expresses its sentiments. A good example of this is "The Poet's Love" cycle by Schumann. Classifying the song in this way is the first step toward discovering its atmosphere. There is always ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... to his ideas. This he called an "orchestrion." Of Vogler's power as an organist Rinck says, "His organ playing was grand, effective in the utmost degree." It was, however, when he was improvising that his power was most astonishing. Once at a musical soiree Vogler and Beethoven extemporized alternately, each giving the other a theme, and Gansbacher records the pitch of enthusiasm to which he was roused by Vogler's masterly playing. Three of Voglers most famous pupils at ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... of 'first appearance in England.' A good test, too, because all the English eat nearly to bursting before they go to the opera. No wonder they never can grasp what the music is about, or who's who! It's all salmon and chicken and lobster and champagne with them—not Beethoven or Wagner or Rossini. Good old Gigue! His spirits are irrepressible! How he is laughing! Mr. Walden looks very serious—almost tragic—I wonder what he is thinking about! I wish I could hear what they are all saying—but it's nothing but ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... were fond of her, and when she wanted company she let these juveniles cluster round her in her garden rambles; but in a general way she preferred loneliness, and to work at the cracked old piano in the room where she slept. Beethoven and Chopin, Mozart and Mendelssohn were companions of whom she ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... permissible, but desirable and frequent and of a thousand hitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night in a real rapture, I walked round the upper gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for the first time to great music; I believe now that it was a rendering of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.... ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Beethoven, the greatest of composers, was born Dec. 17, 1770, at Bonn, Germany, his father being a court singer in the chapel of the Elector of Cologne. He studied in Vienna with Haydn, with whom he did not always agree, however, and afterwards with Albrechtsberger. His first symphony appeared ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... The dramas given included fifteen by Schiller, ten by Shakespeare, three by Goethe, three by Lessing, five by Moliere, four by Hans Sachs, four by Sheridan, eleven by Grillparzer, two each by Kleist and Hebbel, and several by Ibsen, while the operas included three by Beethoven, three by Cherubini, six by Mozart, three by Weber, and several by Wagner. Could an English provincial theatre—could all English provincial theatres together—show a record equal to this? That plays of this kind are given is proof that the German public looks to the municipal ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... had a perverse streak in her to-day. Instead of rising as Nora expected she would, she wheeled on the stool and began Morning Mood from Peer Gynt, because the padre preferred Grieg or Beethoven to Chopin. Nora frowned at the pretty head ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... full of invited guests, brought up the rear. When a start was made, the little police force hustled vehicles out of the way and even stopped tram-cars when necessary; while the band tortured selections from Handel and Beethoven to the intense delight of passers-by, many of whom paused to criticise shortcomings in the procession among themselves. In about an hour it reached its destination, where Kumodini Babu's uncle received the guests. The family barber carried Samarendra in his arms to a chair which had been provided ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... and take up her work again when she returned. She was getting her coat and hat when Mr. Clendon began to play; she changed her mind about the walk and went to the door to open it an inch or so, that she might hear more distinctly the soft strains of the Beethoven Sonata which came floating up to her. As she opened the door, she heard a strange sound rising above the notes of the music; it was that, perhaps, most terrible of all sounds, the unbidden, irresistible groan, rising from a man's tortured heart; and ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... a joke. It had been in the house at least six years. Phil whistled a few bars from a current light opera, and pretended to be absorbed in an old etching of Beethoven that hung over the piano. She glanced covertly at her uncle, who knew perfectly well that Phil was laughing at him. Nan, meanwhile, produced the flute. It was in this fashion that the ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... monster, Jahweh, the Father of Christ? Is he the God who inspired Buddha, and Shakespeare, and Herschel, and Beethoven, and Darwin, and Plato, and Bach? No; not he. But in warfare and massacre, in rapine and in rape, in black revenge and deadly malice, in slavery, and polygamy, and the debasement of women; and in the pomps, vanities, and greeds of royalty, of clericalism, and of ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... instruction—sometimes practising music with them, and accompanying their sonatas on his incomparable flute—recommending to the governess a higher style of music, leading them on gradually to the works of Beethoven and Mozart. By and by he gave them instructions in architecture; taught them, as he said, all that he had learned from Rickman. His teaching was minutely technical. He would assemble his class in a little morning room, with books before them, and a case of mathematical instruments, pens ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... laughed, disrespectfully, at this, and the girl watched her with a mournful face. 'My dear child, you are too delightful! You are trying to reform her? by Beethoven and Bach, ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... like the same extent as the Indians who tortured Brebeuf or Crawford. If the fiendish Pedrarias was a Spaniard, so too was the saintly Las Casas. The latter type would be as impossible among barbarians as an Aristotle or a Beethoven. Indeed, though there are writers who would like to prove the contrary, it may be doubted whether that type has ever attained to perfection except ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... "What shall it be? How shall we capture them, those passionate hearts? That first fine careless rapture? Poetry itself." She gazed softly into the garden a moment, and presently, with a shake of her body, began to play the opening bars of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. The piano was old and woolly. She played without music. The lamplight was rather dim. The moonbeams from the window lay across the keys. Her head was in shadow. And whether it was ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... for it in the aria "Non piu di Flori"; in Zauberfloete; and in chamber music, viz. short adagio for two basset horns and bassoon, and another for two clarinets and three basset horns (Series 10 of Breitkopf & Haertel's complete edition). Beethoven employed it in his Prometheus overture. Mendelssohn used it in military music, and in two concerted pieces for clarinet and basset horn with pianoforte accompaniment, in F and D min., opp. 113 and 114, dedicated to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... from a sofa near by, on which he had thrown himself to listen to the fair musician, and assumed the seat she had vacated. A few prolonged notes, and then one of the most beautiful and intricate compositions of Beethoven, poured its sonorous strains on the ears of the assembly. The performer at length seemed to forget all around him, and at the end of the second chorus joined his own deep, rich tones with the instrument. All were delighted; but Louise, with her quick ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... occupation of the ladies and guessed its import. "My little Feodorovna is about to sing? Then we shall all have a treat, for let me tell you, Lady Olivia, that my young friend possesses the voice of an angel, and the knowledge how to use it properly. Now, what is it to be? Tschaikowski, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Handel, Mozart? Ah, here is something that will suit your voice, little one, 'Caro mio ben!' by Giuseppe Giordani— quaint, delicate, old-fashioned. Come, I will play your accompaniment for ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... a million ways to communicate. Michelangelo communicated, Bach, Beethoven, yes, Elvis Presley communicates. Hemingway, Martha Graham, actors, dancers, even a ...
— The Alternate Plan • Gerry Maddren
... Bonaventura, St. Bernard, through the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages, and develop themselves at last in what is called romantic art and romantic song. A Gothic cathedral like Antwerp or Strasburg,—what is it but a striving upward of the soul to lose itself in God? A symphony of Beethoven,—what is it but the same unbounded longing and striving toward the Infinite and Eternal? The poetry of Wordsworth, of Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Byron, Victor Hugo, Manzoni, all partake of the same element. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the Lord Chamberlain's censorship, et Gounod's "Reine de Saba," The transmigrations of "Un Ballo in Maschera," How composers revamp their music, et seq,—Handel and Keiser, Mozart and Bertati, Beethoven's readaptations of his own works, Rossini and his "Barber of Seville," Verdi's "Nebuchadnezzar," Rossini's "Moses," "Samson et Dalila," Goldmark's "Konigin von Saba," The Biblical operas of Rubinstein, ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and enforce the thought; and they do a higher service than this; for, being a breath from the inner life of genius, they blow power into the reader. To translate these passages into prose were like trying to translate a lily into the mold out of which it springs, or a bar of Beethoven into the sounds of the forum, or the sparkle of stars into the warmth of ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... was known by Dante, who all his life possessed the soul of Beatrice; and Beethoven, who was united from afar with Therese von Brunswick, knew it, though she was the ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... the first number on the programme was Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. This work, as is well known, is rather long, and so, at the end of the third movement, I turned and looked at Barber to see if he was asleep. But his eyes were wide open, feverish, almost glaring; he was twining and untwining his fingers and muttering excitedly. Throughout the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Christmas tree for the youngsters, have looked up a cheap school for Harry and Sidney, have discharged my daily duties as first flute of the Peabody Orchestra, have written a couple of poems and part of an essay on Beethoven and Bismarck, have accomplished at least a hundred thousand miscellaneous nothings.... We are in a state of supreme content with our new home; it really seems to me as incredible that myriads of people have been living in their ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... as the morning and evening breezes among the leaves, or the streams trickling down among the great rocks and wearing their way over precipices. But he moved men and women, of all natures and feelings. He could translate Bach and Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Mozart,—all the great poet-musicians that are silent now, and must be listened to through an interpreter. All the great people and all the little people came to hear him. A princess fell in love with him. She would have married ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Lancelot saw Mary Ann he did not remember having seen her before. This time she was a biped, and wore a white cap. Besides, he hardly glanced at her. He was in a bad temper, and Beethoven was barking terribly at the intruder who stood quaking in the doorway, so that the crockery clattered on the tea-tray she bore. With a smothered oath Lancelot caught up the fiery little spaniel and rammed him into the ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... present moment Kew only sang a few bars of Beethoven in a small voice. He was rather sad, because of Jay. He had not realised till he came home how very thoroughly Jay had disappeared. He led the conversation to Jay. It often happened that Kew led conversations, because conversations, like the public, ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... hour in going through some trashy modern Italian music. "Now, my child, you shall hear something worth listening to;" and with a sigh of relief he would turn to some old piece by Mozart or Bach, some minuet of Haydn's, some romance of Beethoven's, which he would play with no great power of execution, indeed, but with a rare sweetness and delicacy of touch and expression, and with an intense absorption in the music, which communicated itself to even so ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... their experience are marked by still more sweeping alterations in the manner of their art. So that criticism loves to dwell upon and distinguish the varying periods of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... It is so easy, you see, to possess it. There is no need to study either musical theory, practice, history, or biography. An inane expression of vacuous content when music is being rendered, a quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about Chopin and Beethoven without any knowledge of either, and behold! a ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... One night before he moved from the neighborhood Doctor Feldman sent pa a pair of seats for De Pachman. I was seventeen then, and Millie seven. Ma stayed in the store and pa and I went. I remember as if it were yesterday. The concert was at Beethoven Hall and it snowed so that when we arrived I made pa slip off his shoes under the chair, for his socks to dry. I had been studying for eight years then and my teacher was arranging a recital. Strangest ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... contracted at every untoward sound, he had gone out at dark, and gradually the peacefulness of the night had soothed and calmed him as the dew of dusk cools the earth after the heat of a summer's day. The familiar strains of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' came to his mind, and as he walked he idly traced the different movements of the music in the moods ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the corridor from the auditorium and saw an empty seat on the opposite side of the gangway to that on which Lady Walbrook's box was situated; and when the interval was ended and the violinist began to play the first movement of Beethoven's Romance in G, he slipped into the seat, and sat so that he could see every movement that Eleanor made. How very beautiful she looked! She seemed more beautiful to him in her blue evening dress even than she had seemed on ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... 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 which all poets, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... lost in thought. Music, from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, somber and as if coming ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... at his piano at home, and played an adagio of Beethoven or an impromptu by Schubert, his eyes with fine frenzy rolling in the meantime. And when the mighty chorus in a Bach oratorio resounded, he became pale with ecstasy. At the hearing of a good song well sung he ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... adornment as a flower-garden at Wyncomb. Stephen Whitelaw cared about as much for roses and lilies as he cared for Greek poetry or Beethoven's sonatas. At the back of the house there was a great patch of bare shadowless ground devoted to cabbages and potatoes, with a straggling border of savoury herbs; a patch not even divided from the farm land beyond, but melting imperceptibly into a field of mangel-wurzel. There were no ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... myself," Roly-Poly immediately commenced to grimace, putting his hand up to his brim in military fashion, "a right honourable privy frequenter of the local agreeable establishments, Prince Bottlekin, Count Liquorkin, Baron Whoatinkevich-Giddapkovski—Mister Beethoven! Mister Chopin!" he greeted the musicians. "Play me something from the opera The Brave and Charming General Anisimov, or, A Hubbub in the Coolidor. My regards to the little political economist Zociya.[5] A-ha! Then you kiss only at Easter? We shall write that down. Ooh-you, my Tomalachka, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... to technical sacred music. Any grave, solemn, thoughtful, or pathetic music has a proper relation to our higher spiritual nature, whether it be printed in a church service-book or on secular sheets. On me, for example, Beethoven's Sonatas have a far more deeply religious influence than much that has religious names and words. Music is to be judged ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... declared, with a touch of brotherly frankness, which was peculiarly pleasing to this brother-loving girl. "I've been rather overdoing the Persian this week. You must give me some Beethoven presently. And if you really mean to 'play with' me you must also leave off looking so ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Germany pharisaic and iniquitous, the Germany of all the unintelligible pedants whose empty lucubrations and microscopic researches have been so unduly vaunted. But these two Germanies are not the great Germany, that of the artists, the poets, the thinkers, that of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Liebig. This latter Germany is good, generous, humane, pacific; it finds expression in the touching phrase of Goethe, who when asked to write against us replied that he could not find it ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... It is amusing to read in one of the magazines of 1895 that Miss Keller "has a just and intelligent appreciation of different composers from having literally felt their music, Schumann being her favourite." If she knows the difference between Schumann and Beethoven, it is because she has read it, and if she has read it, she remembers it and can tell any one ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... delight or disappointment, or else lay motionless, plunged in the same kind of ecstatic reverie which enthusiastic admirers of classical music yield themselves up to while listening to one of the great Beethoven's divine sonatas. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... minister representing the advantages of a monarchical form of government, and the President contending for a republican one. The viscount noticed that a large portion of the company were promenading in a procession round and round the room to the music of one of Beethoven's grand marches. It was monotonous enough; but it was better than sitting there and listening to the vexed question whether "the peoples" were capable of governing themselves. So he turned to Miss Merlin with a bow ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... heard, from Mrs. Carnaby, that you are back in town. Could you spare us tomorrow evening? It would be so nice of you. The quartet will give Beethoven's F minor, and Alma says it will be well done—the conceit of the child! We hope to have some interesting people What a shocking affair of poor Mrs. Carnaby's! I never knew anything quite so ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... moment for investigation. On the pretext of seeking a lady who had dropped a handkerchief he had crossed the ball room and was therefore in a position to give an accurate account of the waltzes he had heard, dulcet, undulating, capricious measures, far more provocative than Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" which Tolstoy has denounced. The lady that Mr. Coote sought was not in the ball room, and so he had an opportunity of investigating all the retiring rooms, and I need not describe the pensive and shocked faces that listened ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... workers, it must nevertheless be sufficiently obvious that, without the original endowment of heart and brain, no amount of labor, however well applied, could have produced a Shakespeare, a Newton, a Beethoven, or a ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... It was a Beethoven number, a sonata. Uncle William apparently went to sleep. Sergia, watching him, smiled gently. He must be very tired, poor dear. The next number will keep him awake all right. It did. It was sung by a famous baritone—"Fifteen men on a dead man's ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... Mozart, Beethoven, und Méhul Mit chorals of Sebastian Bach Soopline und peaudiful. Der Breitmann feel like holy saints, De tears roon down his fuss; Und he sopped out, "got verdammich - dis ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... developed them so that they became characteristic of the whole people. It was the slow, steady stream of Hollanders pushing southward that civilized Germany. Music as a science was born in Holland. The grandfather of Beethoven was a Dutchman. Gutenberg's forebears were from Holland. And when the Hollanders had gone clear through Germany, and then traversed Italy, and came back home by way of Venice, they struck the rock of spiritual resources and the waters ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... for him to come as soon as possible to the fountainheads of this literature in the works of a few great masters who have set the pace and established the limits for all the rest. In the line of purely instrumental music this has been done by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. The latter, who exercised a vast influence upon the manner of developing a musical thought and in the selection of the orchestral colors in which it can be expressed advantageously, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... all the best love-poetry in existence (except, perhaps, the "Sonnets from the Portuguese") has not been written by men; whether the song which embodies the ideal of pure and tender passion—Adelaida—was written by Frau Beethoven; whether it was the Fornarina, or Raphael, who painted the Sistine Madonna. Nay, we have known one such heretic go so far as to lay his hands upon the ark itself, so to speak, and to defend the startling paradox that, even in physical beauty, man is ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... in his face. I hear the reverberations of Beethoven's dreams in his voice. This man is ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... its music, I said to myself that it had certainly taken a delicate hand to wind up that fine machine. No doubt Madame Blumenthal was a clever woman. It is a good German custom at Homburg to spend the hour preceding dinner in listening to the orchestra in the Kurgarten; Mozart and Beethoven, for organisms in which the interfusion of soul and sense is peculiarly mysterious, are a vigorous stimulus to the appetite. Pickering and I conformed, as we had done the day before, to the fashion, and when we were seated under ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... republican. But it quickly passed away; and no Frenchman, except perhaps Carnot, made so manly a protest as the man of genius at Vienna, who had composed the "Sinfonia Eroica," and with grand republican simplicity inscribed it, "Beethoven a Bonaparte." When the master heard that his former hero had taken the imperial crown, he tore off the dedication with a volley of curses on the renegade and tyrant; and in later years he dedicated the immortal work to the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... surpassing lustre. The sand was of grains of gold, and my keel slid through them without jar or sound. The air was radiant with excess of light, though no sun was to be seen. I inhaled the most delicious perfumes; and harmonies, such as Beethoven may have heard in dreams, but never wrote, floated around me. The atmosphere itself was light, odor, music; and each and all sublimated beyond anything the sober senses are capable of receiving. Before ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... musicians from whom Foster got inspiration to work were Beethoven, Glueck, Weber, Mozart. He was a student of all of them and of the Italian school also, as some of his songs show. Foster's first and only music teacher—except in the 'do-re-mi' exercises in his schoolboy life—testifies that Foster's musical ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Browning's poetry can we find any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about Socrates or Caesar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some extraordinary persons called ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... of Signora Anina's family of nine children, from the elder fiery Achilles to the younger hysterical Niobe. There were perfume-bottles enough to start a coiffeur in business, and woolly lambs enough for a dozen pastoral poems or as many bucolic butchers. But the piano was piled high with Beethoven's sonatas and Chopin's delicious dream-music, while a deluge of French novels had evidently surged over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... the piano cannot have been more than ten feet from the reader's chair; and the strain of reading aloud for an hour against a powerful rendering of the most vigorous compositions of Liszt, Wagner, Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin was a most trying ordeal for voice, brain and nerves. Mr. Pulitzer could apparently enjoy the music and the reading at the same time. Often, when something was played of which he knew the air, he would follow the notes by ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... Handel's time the feeble tone of the oboe rendered a considerable number necessary. The perfection of certain instruments, too, is the cause of modifications in the music written for them. The limited compass of the pianoforte, for example, was certainly the sole reason why Beethoven failed to continue in octaves the entire ascending scale in one of his sonatas. Had the piano in his day possessed its present compass, he would undoubtedly have written the passage throughout in octaves, i.e., as modern pianists play it. If a rigid adherence to the printed letter ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... surround herself with a group of worshipers, and as she never attempted to make herself particular, either by technical mannerisms or by a fantastic interpretation of the hallowed compositions, or by assuming an exclusive right to play some particular master, such as Johann Sebastian Bach, or Beethoven, and as she had no theories about what she played, but contented herself with playing simply what she felt—nobody paid any attention to her, and the critics ignored her: for nobody told them that she played well, and they were not likely to find ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... inattentive of historical students who can afford to ignore this. No modern aesthetician from the Rhine to the Spree affects to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various forms of passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul, or Weber, or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high priest of the pre-historic cult—down to Richard Wagner himself! It was precisely this that the Emperor Frederick knew as crown prince, and that the chancellor had to learn. With ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... wrought, each adding a little that expressed the noblest insight of his own soul at its highest and best moments, and the newest acquirement of his technical skill. Raphael broke up painting, as later on Beethoven broke up music. Not that that blow destroyed the possibility of rare and wonderful developments in special directions. But painting and music alike lost for ever the radiant beauty of their ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... Love is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his mistress or to his cup-bearer. This boundless charter is the right of genius. "No evil fate," said Beethoven, "can befall my music, and he to whom it is become intelligible must become free from all the paltriness which the others drag about ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... recollect (apart from personal reasons) for the sparkling freshness and vigour of the air; for the extent and variety of Golden Gate Park, where I found a bust of Beethoven, but no sign of Bret Harte; for the vast reading-room in the library at Berkeley, a university which is so enchantingly situated, beneath such a sun, and in sight of such a bay, that I marvel that any work can be done there at ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... ideas contained in words. Any one must admit the futility of the attempt to give a dramatic interpretation or language to instrumental music, who reads the description attempted by Lenz and other writers of some of Beethoven's sonatas. Instrumental music does not lend itself to these interpretations, since it is an art with an independent existence. We have observed that in its first development it was used as an accompaniment to the voice, or associated with the movements of the body, or with ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... 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 detractors ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... to the most finished scholar or greatest gentleman in the land that he be absolutely without eye for painting or ear for music—that in his heart he prefer the popular print to the scratch of Rembrandt's needle, or the songs of the hall to Beethoven's "C Minor Symphony." ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... between the two kinds of order, at least in the extreme cases; instinctively, also, it brings them together. We say of astronomical phenomena that they manifest an admirable order, meaning by this that they can be foreseen mathematically. And we find an order no less admirable in a symphony of Beethoven, which is genius, originality, and ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... bore! I am worn out with small talk and back-biting. Society nowadays is composed of cannibals—infinitely more to be dreaded than the Fijians—who only devour the body and leave the character of an individual intact. Child, let us have some music by way of variety. Play that symphony of Beethoven that I ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... floated forth with the serene grace of a frail bubble ascending through the still atmosphere of a June day. The perfect roundness of her limbs formed suave and enchanting curves. It was like listening to the most spiritual symphony of Beethoven the divine, to watch the harmonious flow of lines. This, indeed was a pleasure cheaply purchased at any price. What cared I if I had waded to the portal of this wonder through another's blood. I would have given my own to enjoy one such moment of intoxication ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... am not deaf, like Beethoven," he said, trying to please her. "That would have been worse. Do you know, last night Falloden and I had a glorious talk? He was awfully decent. He made me tell him all about Poland and my people. He never scoffed once. He ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a reasoning being, it follows that she herself must be capable of reasoning, since a stream can rise no higher than its fountain. And yet the bitter truth stares us in the face. We have no Shakespeare, Michelangelo, or Beethoven; our Darwins, our Schumanns are mute and inglorious; our Miltons, Raphaels, and Herbert Spencers ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... hard as his pupil to maintain his reserve of instruction. Mark took long walks with Richard Ford when Richard was home in his vacations, and long walks by himself when Richard was at Cooper's Hill. He often went to Wychford Rectory, where he learnt to enjoy Schumann and Beethoven ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... arrived was some holiday; so there was grand mass in the cathedral, and such music!—the immense building was filled with the sound. The full organ was played, and some of the priest singers took part. Never did music so overcome me. The sublime piece,—as I thought of Beethoven's, surely of some great composer,—performed in this glorious old cathedral, was beyond all that I had ever dreamt of. It seems to me that I might think of it again in my dying hour with delight. I felt as if it created a new soul in me. Such gushes of sweet sound, such joyful fulness ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen
... turn his hand to almost anything. Among other things, he could play splendidly on the violin—an instrument which he styled a fiddle, and which MacSweenie called a "fuddle." His repertoire was neither extensive nor select. If you had asked for something of Beethoven or Mozart he would have opened his eyes, perhaps also his mouth. But at a Strathspey or the Reel o' Tulloch he was almost equal to Neil Gow himself—so admirable were his tune and time. In a lonesome land, where amusements are few and the nights long, ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... man can never be made to understand the glories of sunrise, or the light upon the far-off mountains; just as a deaf man may read books about acoustics, but they will not give him a notion of what it is to hear Beethoven, so we must have love to Christ before we know what love to Christ is, and we must consciously experience the love of Christ ere we know what the love of Christ is. We must have love to Christ in order to have a deep and living possession ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... present day and age, in view of the quite astonishing change in national psychology which that revelation implies. Minstrels and heralds were once allowed safe conduct into the enemy's country, in time of war. Yet, in the last war, it was considered right and proper to hiss the work of Beethoven off the stage, and responsible newspapers seriously suggested that never again should a note of German music, of however great antiquity, be heard in England! We are supposed to have progressed towards internationalism, ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... and after that she played dreamy snatches from Beethoven while he leaned back in an easy chair and listened. What a harmonious and pleasant life stretched before the two together! Mrs. Gray lived over again through her daughter's heart days when Robert Gray and she were learning that life was sweetest when they were together, and she ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... Beethoven was deaf, and could not hear the airs he composed; but when the song of universal disenthralment arises, and white Circassian stands up by the side of black Ethiopian, and tropical groves wave to the Lebanon cedars, we shall, standing ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... have anything to do with the principles of Socialism. Nor need we decide whether Whistler, Raphael or Carpaccio has left us the most satisfying beauty, or which was the greater musician, Wagner, Scarlatti or Beethoven, nor pronounce on the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy in any prescribed way, because we ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... table now, but no one saw him, for this moment was one of deep gravity. Schoppenvoll, a tall, straight-backed man with the dignity of a major, a waving gray pompadour, and a clean-cut face that might have belonged to a Beethoven, set down the tray at the very edge of the table and slid it gently into place. An overgrown fat boy, with his sleeves rolled to his shoulders, brought three shining glasses, three bottles of Glanzen Wasser and ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... that—ungrateful of me! But I'm sick of it all, the invasion of the classes, the women in trousers, the beggars on horseback, the Jazz music. I want the old world back—the womanly women, everybody labeled, and Beethoven." ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... she can without neglecting duties she feels more important. Even when she has no musical talent, but merely a love for music, though she cannot give much pleasure to others, I think she may get an elevation of mind from stumbling through Beethoven and Wagner which is worth the time she spends. Still, I think singing is of more practical use than instrumental music, and the power to play simple things well which is so rare is in most cases more to the purpose than to stumble through Beethoven ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... longing for the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, and his belief in the South, can still appeal to SOMETHING LEFT in us! Ah, some time or other it will be over with it!—but who can doubt that it will be over still sooner with the intelligence and taste for Beethoven! For he was only the last echo of a break and transition in style, and NOT, like Mozart, the last echo of a great European taste which had existed for centuries. Beethoven is the intermediate event between an old mellow soul that ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... In this struggle we shall continue to the end to act as a civilised nation, to whom the heritage of a Goethe, a Beethoven or a Kant is as sacred as our own hearth and home. We answer for that in our own name and ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... made with a genius between the "man" and the "artist" has been justly ridiculed by Wagner himself. For the truest individuality of an artist is in his art, not when he leaves his own proper sphere and enters one that is foreign to him. Beethoven is the writer of symphonies and sonatas, not the suspicious friend and unmannerly plebeian. The man is the same in both relations, i.e. his character remains the same, only it manifests itself differently under changed conditions, and the difference lies not in him, but in the point ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven[24] in the distance. He is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war in his members sometimes divides the man's attention. He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scanned the record of Beethoven's thought, And made the dumb chords speak both clear and low, And spread the dead man's voice till I was caught Away, and now seemed long and long ago. Methought in Tellus' bosom still I lay, While ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... the first drawing-room, where Luigi Gulli, a young man, swarthy and curly-haired as an Arab, who had left his native Calabria in search of fortune, was executing, with much feeling, Beethoven's sonata in C minor. The Marchesa d'Ateleta, a patroness of his, was standing near the piano, with her eyes fixed on the keys. By degrees, the sweet and grave music drew all these frivolous spirits within its magic circle, like ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... into an Andante and Scherzo of Beethoven. How the girl threw herself into it, bringing out the wailing love-song of the Andante, the dainty tripping mirth of the Scherzo, in a way which set every nerve in Langham vibrating! Yet the art of it was wholly unconscious. The music was the mere natural voice of her inmost self. A comparison full ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... half-work, and disarray, Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong, Hath risen Goethe's, Wordsworth's song; Yet even I (and none will bow Deeper to these) must needs allow, They yield us not, to soothe our pains, Such multitude of heavenly strains As from the kings of sound are blown, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn." ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to his wife, "health and spirits good, but with a soft touch of melancholy, a little homesickness, a longing for deep woods and lakes, for a desert, for yourself and the children, and all this mixed up with a sunset and Beethoven." ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... preceding, second daughter of Madame Guenee, and sister of Madame Auffray. Having taken pity on Pierrette Lorrain in her sickness, she gave to her, in 1828, the pleasures of music, playing the compositions of Weber, Beethoven or ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... often concerts, etc., for those who like them; I only go to a shilling affair that comes off every Saturday at what they call the Pump Room. On these occasions there is sometimes some Good Music if not excellently played. Last Saturday I heard a fine Trio of Beethoven. Mendelssohn's things are mostly tiresome to me. I have brought my old Handel Book here and recreate myself now and then with pounding one of the old Giant's Overtures on my sister's Piano, as I used to do on that Spinnet at my Cottage. As to Operas, and Exeter Halls, I have almost done with them: ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... gone than she sat down to the piano, and began singing, song after song, as she had never sung before—English, German, French, Italian—songs of passion and of pain—Beethoven's Kennst du das Land, and Spohr's Rose softly blooming, and Blumenthal's Old, Old Story, and then Il Segreto and O mio Fernando and Stride la vampa, and rising to heights she seldom attempted, Modi ab modi and Ab fors' e lui che l'anima; ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... following Lectures:—Besides those mentioned in the Lectures, the following works are alluded to, or quoted;—Beattie's Essays; Burnet's History of Music; Hogart's Musical History; Edwards's History of the Opera; The Harmonicon; Schlegel's Life of Handel; Holmes' Life of Mozart; Moschele's Life of Beethoven.] ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... action. As General Thario wrote, "We are fighting on the wrong continent." Joe was even broader and more emphatic. "It's a putup job," he complained, "to keep costplus plants like this operating. If they called off their silly war (Beethoven down in the cellar during the siege of Vienna expresses the right attitude) and went home, the country would fall back into depression, we'd have some kind of revolution and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted. ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... a place of whispering leaves and gloom, I saw, too dark, too dumb for bronze or stone, One tragic head that bowed against the sky; O, in a hush too deep for any tomb I saw Beethoven, dreadfully alone With his own grief, and ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... great to me," said the Gay Lady very gently, "that I would give—years of my life to be able to sing one song as you sing Beethoven's 'Adelaide.'" ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... her and was willing to postpone the 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 ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... certainly distinguishes the civilization of this age. It has taken eighteen hundred years for the principles of the Christian religion to begin to be practically incorporated in government and in ordinary business, and it will take a long time for Beethoven to be popularly recognized; but there is growth toward him, and not away from him, and when the average culture has reached his height, some other genius will still more profoundly and delicately express ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... next afternoon found him again at the public piano, devoting all the magic of his genius to charming a contemptible Christendom. He gave them Beethoven and Bach, Paradies and Tschaikowski, unrolled to them the vast treasures of his art and memory. And very soon, lo! the Christian rats were pattering back again, only more wisely and cautiously. They came crawling ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... was far too great a person to be "Mistered." Fancy Mr. Beethoven, or Mr. Paderewski! Joyselle the Great and Glorious would help him. The mater appeared to like him. It was strange, for she had been in a terrible rage the first day or two—but she certainly was as pleased ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the mornings, while at his desk, he had heard her; and oddly enough, he seemed to sense her moods by what she played. (That's the poet.) When she played Chopin or Chaminade she went about gaily all the day; when she played Beethoven, Grieg or Bach, Thomas felt ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath |
