"Sonata" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... publisher's shop]; and Mr. Norris's Poem on Friendship, a work, which I doubt, though honored with a ghost's approbation, we may now seek for as vainly as Correlli tormented his memory to recover the sonata which the devil played to him in a dream. Presently after, from former habits we may suppose, the guest desires a cup of tea; but, bethinking herself of her new character, escapes from her own proposal by recollecting that Mr. Bargrave ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... chatting together, the two little girls were amusing themselves in the drawing room, which communicated with the parlour by folding doors, and just as the Doctor was remarking how quiet they were, the piano was struck, and a pretty sonata played. Mrs. Sherman was surprised to find it was Fanny, and still more so, on hearing that Helen had been her sole instructress, as she played very prettily. The Doctor, who was passionately fond of music, was then very anxious to hear Helen play, and asked her to do so, but kind feeling restrained ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... impressed by a long instrumental composition to the same degree as a practised hearer, and especially a hearer who has already followed the composition through several times before; but the longest symphony or sonata always contains a variety of moments which are intensely pleasing to the ordinary hearer listening seriously to them for the first time. The difference between the casual hearer and the more cultivated one is that with practice will come a perception of a larger number of these attractive ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... journal, the Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik. In a more purely musical manner, his feelings took shape in such works as his "Daidsbuendler" Dances, the "Chiarina" of the Carnival, the F-Sharp Minor Sonata, the Kreisleriana, the Humoreske, the Novelettes, and the Nocturnes,—truly an offering of rare beauty, and well worthy to express the feelings of the inspired lover. They bore witness of his adoration to all who knew him, and all who ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... tell me what it means? I want to find the old unhappy far off things which Wordsworth imagined in the Gaelic song of the 'Highland Lass.' I feel out of it, uneasy, thinking all the time what a poor creature I must be. I remember the mother of the sonata players approaching me with beaming countenance on the occasion of one of these performances, expecting the compliment which I faltered forth, doing my best not to look insincere. 'And I have this every evening of my life,' cried the triumphant mother. 'Good ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty our ears and too awful for our terrors? ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... tunes, gone accurately through the whole of Beethoven's Sonata in B, to let him know that I was within hearing, but he ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... you play a Mozart sonata yet, Isabel? The more need to practise. All one's life is a music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time. But ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the layman is beset with difficulties. Most of the talk about art which he hears is either the translation of picture or sonata into terms of literary sentiment or it is a discussion of the way the thing is done. He knows at least that painting is not the same as literature and that music has its own province; he recognizes that the meaning of pictures is not literary ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... acquainted with the great Gounod and with the brilliant but erratic Offenbach. Gounod introduced her to many of the greatest composers and singers. Among her friendliest acquaintances she numbered Wagner and Liszt. The latter wrote her a sonata to sing, and Wagner tried to get her permission for him to introduce her into the trilogy he was then at work upon. Meissonier made an exquisite study of her, and the younger Dumas made her the heroine of one of his brightest comedies, "La ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... on the program for one number. My selection might have appeared at that particular time as a bit of affectation, but I considered it deeply appropriate; I played Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique." When I sat down at the piano and glanced into the faces of the several hundreds of people who were there solely on account of love or sympathy for me, emotions swelled in my heart which enabled me to play the "Pathetique" as I could never ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... Djinns," the attitude more tenderly revealed in the "Variations Symphoniques," and, above all, the sonata in A Major, is dramatically represented. The solitary dreamer in his tower is surrounded and assailed by evil spirits, we hear the beating of their great wings as they troop past, but the dreamer is strong and undismayed, and in the end he is ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... met it was with the most delighted cordiality on the part of both. "Mein lieber Herr," Thrum would say (with some malice), "your sonata in x flat is divine." "Chevalier," Baroski would reply, "dat andante movement in w is worthy of Beethoven. I gif you my sacred honour," and so forth. In fact, they loved each other as gentlemen in ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not novel, expensive, and singular. He is a lad of high spirit; he calls the city a poor dull prison, in which he cannot bear to be confined; and though he may not intend to mount his nag, stiffens his cravat, whistles a sonata, to which his whip applied to the boot forms an accompaniment; while his spurs wage war with the flounces of a fashionably-dressed belle, or come occasionally in painful contact with the full-stretched stockings ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Dec. 27. Schubert's Pianoforte Sonata for Four Hands (Opus 140) orchestrated by Joseph Joachim, given by the Harvard Musical Association, ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... sight, for the thousandth time he experienced the artistic satisfaction of the connoisseur in collegiate architecture, and mentally limned the remainder of the plan. His sensations were like those of a skilled musician who has heard the first movement of a masterly sonata and is left to imagine the perfect whole. The sun, now mounting toward the zenith, was shortening the shadows of the tower on the slate roof that shone in the bright atmosphere like dull silver. Not a student was in sight, and the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... grand Sonata" for the piano-forte, composed by J. B. Cramer, fame speaks largely. An eminent connoisseur and reviewer speaks of it in these words: "We here recognise the genuine style of J. B. Cramer—this is really a grand sonata. It consists of three different movements, each so excellent in its kind, that it is difficult ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... N. music; concert; strain, tune, air; melody &c 413; aria, arietta^; piece of music [Fr.], work, number, opus; sonata; rondo, rondeau [Fr.]; pastorale, cavatina^, roulade^, fantasia, concerto, overture, symphony, variations, cadenza; cadence; fugue, canon, quodlibet, serenade, notturno [It], dithyramb; opera, operetta; oratorio; composition, movement; stave; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Mary. "Don't you dare give her a stick, Tom." But Tom did dare, and Mrs. Norris, with her smiling benignity, stood waving the stick back and forth over the fire in time with the andante movement of her favourite Brahms sonata. ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... laird?' said Willie, interrupting a sonata of Corelli, of which he had whistled several bars ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... written can claim to reproduce the individuality which characterizes the handwriting of myriads of different persons. Personality, then, is the virtuoso's one great unassailable stronghold. It is personality that makes us want to hear a half dozen different renderings of a single Beethoven sonata by a half dozen different pianists. Each has the charm ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... in winter," writes the biographer of Beethoven, "we were walking through a narrow street of Bonn. 'Hush!' exclaimed the great composer, suddenly pausing before a little, mean dwelling, 'what sound is that? It is from my Sonata in F. Hark! ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... same subject with a passage taken from a piano and violin sonata of Beethoven. The non-legato passages here are not to be played on the violin in a way approaching the staccato, although they are written as detached notes; and the piano part follows ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... show." She wore a white poudesoy gown, embroidered with gold, and the prettiest high-heeled satin slippers, and a head-dress of wonderful workmanship. "For I have been at a concert of music, cousin Dick, and heard two overtures of Mr. Handel's and a sonata by Corella, done by the very ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... from "Rosamunde," and the 24th bar in his Serenade (Staendchen), the 13th and following bars of the Crescendo in the Largo Appassionato of Beethoven's Op. 2. Or if you wish to have an example where all is exception, like one of the south nave windows in York Minster, the opening of the "Sonata Appassionata," Op. 57. ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... coat—that looked like nobody else's coat—and, thin and black and idle, she sat in a low chair by the fire, and put out her hand for her cup. 'I've been to a musical,' she said. And she told them how she had been wedged into a corner for an interminable sonata and hadn't been able to get away. 'I tried to, once, but my hostess saw me and made a most ominous hiss at me; every one's eye was turned on me, and I sank back again, covered with ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was Harriet or Ann Spencer who brought it in—when It came in, Dick, who pretends to be abashed upon such occasions, gave one swift glance upward and then emitted a long, low, expressive whistle. When Beethoven found himself throbbing with undescribable emotions he composed a sonata; when Keats felt odd things stirring within him he wrote an ode to an urn, but my friend Dick, quite as evidently on fire with his emotions, merely whistled—and then looked around evidently embarrassed lest he should have infringed upon the proprieties ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... secret. The grandfather while at work used to trouble and puzzle himself how to get a very sharp edge, and at length one night he dreamed how to do it. From that time he became prosperous. If a celebrated sonata was revealed in a dream, why not the way to sharpen ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Sonata I should like to have a few copies; I would indeed beg you always to send me half a dozen copies; I never sell any—there are, however, here and there poor Musici, to whom one cannot refuse a thing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the air—"The Ride of the Valkyrie;" and now the driving rain and the salt spindrift, the flapping of the leech of our brown sail, every note of accompaniment is being given to that great air that runs through Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, which the wind is singing louder and louder. Tim sits up well to windward, the tiller quivering in his hand, the rain beating on one side of his face, his beard blowing out from the other. Tim doesn't think what a good model ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... last address I gave him was a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you didn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, the most ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the letter; I think you would better read it aloud ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... kind of you," she said. "It's so seldom that any one realizes what these things mean to the cook. A souffle like this is an inspiration—like a sonata to a musician. But no one ever dreams of the cook; and the most you can expect from a butler is, 'Oh, it cut very nice, ma'am, I'm sure. Very nice!'" She made a despairing gesture. "But some people would call Chopin ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... is it a penitential psalm you're singing, or is my friend Mike endeavoring to raise your spirits with a Galway sonata?" ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... threw open the keyboard and struck a chord. Not a sound disturbed the quiet of the room. 'Is there anything wrong with me?' he thought, with a pang; and drawing in a seat, obstinately persisted in his attempts to ravish silence, now with sparkling arpeggios, now with a sonata of Beethoven's which (in happier days) he knew to be one of the loudest pieces of that powerful composer. Still not a sound. He gave the Broadwood two great bangs with his clenched first. All was still as the grave. The young barrister ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... played together. But for a long time things did not go well; we had not the necessary music, and that which we had my wife could not play at sight. I amused myself with their difficulties. I aided them, I made proposals, and they finally executed a few pieces,—songs without words, and a little sonata by Mozart. He played in a marvellous manner. He had what is called the energetic and tender tone. As for difficulties, there were none for him. Scarcely had he begun to play, when his face changed. He became serious, and much more sympathetic. He ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... sonata we all applauded Cleopatra just as loudly as we could, in the hope that she would faint with surprise and stop ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... he was at the gate of a villa, almost buried in the bosk, and listening with all his critical attention to a thrilling performance—yes, thrilling was the word—of Chopin's music. What! The last movement of the B flat minor sonata, the funeral march sonata, but no more like the interpretation he had heard from ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... and Sir Victor did not return. Edith still remained at the piano, the gleam of the candles falling upon her thoughtful face, playing the weird "Moonlight Sonata." She played so softly that the shrill whistling of the wind around the gables, the heavy soughing of the trees, was plainly audible above it. Ten minutes more, and her lover did not return. Wondering a little what the telegram could contain, she arose and walked to the window, drew the ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... there is an intelligent activity in the one that is not in the other. Now no scientific analysis of a body will reveal the secret of this activity. As well might your analysis of a phonographic record hope to disclose a sonata of Beethoven latent in the waving lines. No power of chemistry could reveal any difference between the gray matter of Plato's brain and that of the humblest citizen of Athens. All the difference between man, all that makes a man a man, and an ox an ox, is beyond the reach of any of your physico-chemical ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... who looked at my song "Man in Vain" in Ulysses might think it was taken from "Batti, batti." I should like to say it was taken from, or suggested by, a few bars in the opening of Beethoven's pianoforte sonata op. 78, and a few bars in the accompaniment to the duet "Hark how the Songsters" in Purcell's Timon of Athens. I am not aware of having borrowed more in the song than what follows as natural development of these two passages ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... should more especially belong to you. Usually a woman gives up her own name and takes her husband's—" An idea forced itself upon her and made her blush. She took Roger's hand and led him to the open piano.—"Listen," said she, "I can play my sonata now like an angel!" and her fingers were already running over the ivory keys, when she felt herself ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. Is it worth doing?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... meal-times Edmond, the wounded cherub with the pretty face, lent a listening ear to Delaherche's unceasing chatter, blushing if ever Gilberte asked him to pass her the salt, while at evening M. de Gartlauben, seated in the study, with eyes upturned in silent ecstasy, listened to a sonata by Mozart performed for his benefit by the young woman in the adjoining drawing-room, a stillness as of death continued to pervade the apartment where Colonel de Vineuil and Madame Delaherche spent their days, the blinds tight drawn, the lamp continually burning, like a votive candle illuminating ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... came to Betty's turn she played conscientiously through the Sonata Pathetique, with which she had been wrestling for two hours a day for the last month. That very morning she had played it over without a single fault, and really and truly the runs had sounded quite professional; but when your head throbs, and your cheeks burn, and your heart pounds, ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... violence of his sensations, and instantly seized his fiddle in hopes of expressing what he had just heard; but in vain. He, however, directly composed a piece, which is perhaps the best of all his works, and called it the 'Devil's Sonata;' he knew it, however, to be so inferior to what his sleep had produced, that he stated he would have broken his instrument, and abandoned music for ever, if he could ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... di fortuna' with which this pastorello sailed along. The character of the music is ease and largeness: as the shepherd lived, so God Almighty walked on the wind. The music breathes ease: but words must tell us who takes it easy. Beethoven's Sonata—Op. 14—is meant to express the discord and gradual atonement of two lovers, or a man and his wife: and he was disgusted that every one did not see what was meant: in truth, it expresses any resistance ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... frequency of measure accent. It has to work within a single tonality—remain in one key or revolve around one key in such a manner as to preserve its own unity as a single being. Hence arise the long movements of the sonata and symphony. It is not possible to arrive at similar impressions upon hearers by the use of shorter, disjointed movements. Only by carrying a movement on for some time, and so developing it as to impress some one idea as central, and at the same time to arrive eventually at some kind of a climax ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... purely independent and parallel growth, it is not too much to assert that without Sebastian Bach and his matchless studies for the piano, organ, and orchestra, we could not have had the varied musical development in sonata and symphony from such masters as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Three of Sebastian Bach's sons became distinguished musicians, and to Emanuel we owe the artistic development of the sonata, which in its turn became ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... his lyre, Smiting a cavernous basso from the shrouds And climbing up his gamut through the stays, Through buntlines, bowlines, ratlines, till it shrills An alto keener than the locust sings, And all the great Aeolian orchestra Storms out its mad sonata in the gale? Is not ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to the close of a complicated and dreary sonata, I heard Margrave abruptly ask her if she could play the Tarantella, that famous Neapolitan air which is founded on the legendary belief that the bite of the tarantula excites an irresistible desire to dance. On that highbred spinster's ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is long and life is short' is a truth which every one feels, or ought to feel; yet surely those who were in London last May, and had in one week the opportunities of hearing Rubenstein play the Sonata Impassionata, of seeing Wagner conduct the Spinning-Wheel Chorus from the Flying Dutchman, and of studying art at the Grosvenor Gallery, have very little to complain of as regards human ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... then, Frau von Genzinger that threatened Polzelli's supremacy. Nor was it Madame Bartolozzi, for whom Haydn wrote a sonata and three trios; nor Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote words for many of his canzonets. Nor yet Mrs. Hodges, for whom he composed, and whom he called "the loveliest woman I ever saw." Nor yet again the fascinating actress, Mrs. Billington, of whom the pleasant story is told, that Haydn, when he ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Tartini, of Padua, the celebrated composer of the Devil's Sonata: in which he attempted to reproduce an air which he dreamt that Satan had played to him while he was asleep; but, in his own opinion, he failed so entirely, that he declared that if he had any other means of livelihood ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... might go home, and put the finishing touch to my sonata for the piano-forte; but it is not yet eleven o'clock, and, withal, a beautiful summer night. I will lay any wager, that, at my next-door neighbour's, (the Oberjagermeister,) the young ladies are sitting at the window, screaming down into the ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... your fan, my dear," she said, in her easy off-hand manner. "Why do you allow these two barbarous men to keep you here while the great Bootmann is playing the Nightmare Sonata in the next room? Launce! Mr. Turlington! follow me, and learn to be musical directly! You have only to shut your eyes, and you will fancy you hear four modern German composers playing, instead of one, and not the ghost of a ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... was a very little fellow," he said, "I played at a reception at a Russian count's, and, for an urchin of seven, I flatter myself that I swung through Beethoven's 'Kreutzer Sonata' pretty successfully. ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... mood left her. In the dim candle-light her eyes were tender again. Very softly she played the first two movements of the "Moonlight" sonata. ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... Fibres into a kind of Simper, and at length burst out into an open Laugh. The third who entered the Lists was a Foot-man, who in Defiance of the Merry-Andrew, and all his Arts, whistled a Scotch Tune and an Italian Sonata, with so settled a Countenance, that he bore away the Prize, to the great Admiration of some Hundreds of Persons, who, as well as my self, were present at this Trial of Skill. Now, Sir, I humbly conceive, whatever you have determined of the Grinners, the Whistlers ought to be encouraged, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... temperament, always full-sounding, rich in an almost unbounded strength. Of course, since Vieuxtemps wrote his concertos, a great variety of fine modern works has appeared, the appreciation of chamber-music has grown and developed, and with it that of the sonata. And the modern violin sonata is also a vehicle for violin virtuosity in the very best meaning of the word. The sonatas of Cesar Franck, d'Indy, Theodore Dubois, Lekeu, Vierne, Ropartz, Lazarri—they are all highly expressive, yet at ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... resulted in a new form intended to displace the symphony: the symphonic poem, in a single, varied movement, and always on a definite poetic subject. Here was at once a relief and a recess from the classic rigor. Away with sonata form and all the odious code of rules! In the story of the title will lie all the outline ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... playing. Adapt herself, is not the right expression—Charlotte's skill and power enabled her, in order to please her husband, to keep up with him when he went too fast, and hold in for him if he hesitated; but Ottilie, who had several times heard them play the sonata together, seemed to have learnt it according to the idea in which they accompanied each other—she had so completely made his defects her own, that a kind of living whole resulted from it, which did not move indeed according to exact rule, but the effect ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... yet; and I can't take a step in the direction of the great house till I have got the answer to my letter, and till I know that Midwinter is out of the way. Patience! patience! I must go and forget myself at my piano. There is the 'Moonlight Sonata' open, and tempting me, on the music-stand. Have I nerve enough to play it, I wonder? Or will it set me shuddering with the mystery and terror of it, as it did ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the dance music, the sonata he had chosen was like a breath of pure, heather-scented air floating in upon the gas-laden atmosphere of the heated room; and at the first strains of the delicious melody the people below stopped talking, and turned ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... pianistic miracle. He could play anything on site and composed over 400 works centered around "his" instrument. Among his key works are his Hungarian Rhapsodies, his Transcendental Etudes, his Concert Etudes, his Etudes based on variations of Paganinini's Violin Caprices and his Sonata, one of the most important of the nineteenth century. He also wrote thousands of letters, of which 399 are translated into English in this second of a 2-volume set of letters (the first volume contains ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... down the letter. His head was in a whirl. He only half heard the notes of the tutor's sonata as they rose and fell on his ear. Presently, with ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... rude enough to look in. Most of them are furnished with telephones and the city water; here a bride bends over a chafing dish; another glance discloses an oil-painting that was once shown in the Royal Academy. From the next tent float the strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and, as we stop to listen, a gentleman and his wife step out. An auto picks them up and off they whirl to Jasper Avenue. The Lord o' the Tents of Shem disappears into his bank and Milady drives on to the Government house to read before the Literary Club a paper on Browning's ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the Major's expectations and appreciated his good qualities and the high character which he enjoyed in his profession. Glorvina, a very handsome, fresh-coloured, black-haired, blue-eyed young lady, who could ride a horse, or play a sonata with any girl out of the County Cork, seemed to be the very person destined to insure Dobbin's happiness—much more than that poor good little weak-spur'ted Amelia, about whom he used to take on so.—"Look at Glorvina enter a room," Mrs. O'Dowd would say, "and compare her with ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... near the Lawrence Hotel at Luray, the Moonlight Sonata floated dreamily upon the calm night air, and we seemed to feel the beauty of ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... over his versatility, his shorter piano pieces and songs are as yet most popular in the making of programmes. However, Henry T. Finck says of his sonatas: "As regards the sonatas, I ought to bear MacDowell a decided grudge. After I had written and argued a hundred times that the sonata form was 'played out,' he went to work and wrote four sonatas to confute me. To be sure, I might have my revenge and say they are 'not sonatas'; but they are no more unorthodox than the sonatas of Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Grieg, though they have ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... energies. The symmetrical picture calls out a set of motor impulses which "balance,"—a system of energies reacting on one centre; the sonnet takes us out on one wave of rhythm and of thought, to bring us back on another to the same point; the sonata does the same in melody. In the "whirling circle" of the drama, not a word or an act that is not indissolubly linked with before and after. Thus the unity of a work of art makes of the system of suggested energies which form the foreground ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... still, and mysteriously revealed. These a young man longs to know of, they are his life. He imagines himself sitting by her, when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name; sometimes she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata. Letting her hands droop upon the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of life, of its disenchantments. He knows well what she means, he has suffered as she has; but could he tell her, could she understand, that in his ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Panshin to sing his song again; but he protested that he did not wish to torture the ears of the musical German, and suggested to Lisa that they should attack Beethoven's sonata. Then Marya Dmitrievna heaved a sigh, and in her turn suggested to Gedeonovsky a walk in the garden. "I should like," she said, "to have a little more talk, and to consult you about our poor Fedya." Gedeonovsky bowed with a smirk, and with two fingers picked up his hat, on the brim ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... to another room to take our coffee. The merchant and his son, both ardent musicians in their leisure hours, played a sonata for pianoforte and violin. I was at the opposite extremity of the room, looking at some fine proof impressions of prints from the old masters, when a voice at my side startled me ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... the "Moonlight Sonata". A trained musical critic would probably have found much to cavil at in his rendering of the piece, but it was undoubtedly good for a public school player. Of course he was encored. The gallery would have encored ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... of music," said Betty, thinking of the hour's daily struggle with the Mikado and the Moonlight Sonata. "But three arts. What could the third one be?" Her thoughts played for an instant with unheard-of triumphs achieved behind footlights—rapturous ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... wondering herself that she never did. They are not satisfied with hearing her once. They ask for more, and they get it. The other evening I had to keep quiet on my chair while she thumped through four pieces one after the other, including the Beethoven Sonata. We knew it was the Beethoven Sonata. She told us before she started it was going to be the Beethoven Sonata, otherwise, for all any of us could have guessed, it might have been the 'Battle of Prague.' We all sat round with wooden faces, staring at our boots. Afterwards those of them that couldn't ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... here. During his second visit to London he came in contact with a certain amateur violinist whose professed fondness for the extreme upper notes of his instrument was such as to incite Haydn to perpetrate a joke at his expense. He therefore wrote a seemingly simple sonata for piano and violin, which he called 'Jacob's Dream,' and dispatched it anonymously to the conceited violinist. The player was charmed with the manner in which the piece began. It was apparent that ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... pageant was too formal a subject to suit all moods—too much like a brass band always playing in the room. The easel picture had to be without too definite a subject, and could no more permit being translated into words than a sonata. Some of Giovanni Bellini's late works are already of this kind. They are full of that subtle, refined poetry which can be expressed in form and colour alone. But they were a little too austere in form, a little too sober in colour, for ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... Peer Gynt was given in two theatres during each winter of the war. All of Ibsen's dramas played to crowded houses. Reinhardt, during the last winter I was in Berlin, produced Strindberg's "Ghost Sonata," in quite a wonderful way. The play was horrible and grewsome enough, but as produced by him, it gave a strong man nightmare for ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... if I were unhappy?" she demanded, flashing on him her old, bright smile. "It was the music, and the twilight, and the way you played. That sonata ought never to be played except in a crowded room ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... with no manner at all. She looked rather like a superior sort of housemaid. She could get through a sonata, she wrote a pretty English hand, knew French grammar and orthography—a complete commercial education, in short. She was impatient enough to be married and leave the paternal roof, finding it as dull at home as a lieutenant finds the nightwatch at sea; at the same time, it ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... moments with me have been those in which pain and pleasure, yearning and satisfaction, knowledge and seeking, have been so exquisitely and so intangibly blended, in listening to some deep sonata, some stately and pathetic old ciacconna or gavotte, some concerto or symphony; the thing nearest heaven is to sit apart with closed eyes while the orchestra or the individual performer interprets for one the mystic poetry, or the dramatic fire, or ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... 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 exhibited by artists and painters ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... "Ramona" in California, or "The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains" in Tennessee, or "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" in Ohio, or "The Grandissimes" near New Orleans, the nearest he could come to my modest demand was "The Kreutzer Sonata" or the last effort of Miss Laura Jean Libbey, a popular American novelist, who describes in glowing colours how two aristocratic Englishmen, fighting a duel near London somewhere in the seventies, were interrupted by the heroine, who drove between ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... peculiarity of Chopin's style which may be included under the name of rubato, namely, his habit of "robbing" the note, not of its duration, but its accent. Every student of music knows that the symphony and sonata are called "idealized dance forms," because they are direct outgrowths of the dances that were cultivated originally in Italy, France, and Germany. Now, one peculiarity of these dances is the fact ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... The latest and most atrocious outrage on good taste in this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as "the Hammerklavier." All musicians of finer feeling should unite to kill this ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... unduly tired, and with all the dear instruments intact, unharmed by rough hands of porters and Custom House officers, that, one of these days, in three or four months, when I am well, I look forward to contributing the viola da gamba part of a sonata to the concert of the old instrumental music which he will give when he has put his choir in order: you know I used to play that instrument in my young days. A more innocent wish never entered into the heart of a human being, you will ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... possessed of greater knowledge. They who sat there talking in whispers until such time as old Deleglise turned towards them again, radiant with consciousness of success, the savoury triumph steaming between his hands, when, like the sudden swell of the Moonlight Sonata, the talk would rush once more into a roar, were men whose names were then—and some are still—more or less household words throughout the English-speaking world. Artists, musicians, actors, writers, scholars, droles, their wit and wisdom, their sayings and their doings must be tolerably ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... asked Panshine to repeat his romance; but he declared that he did not like to offend the ears of the scientific German, and proposed to Liza to begin Beethoven's sonata. On this, Maria Dmitrievna sighed, and, on her part, proposed a stroll in the ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... the sunshine, the glitter, the hubbub, intoxicated her; she made up stories by the dozen, as her dark eyes followed the gay equipages. When Fraeulein summoned her she went away reluctantly; the stories got into her head, and stopped there all the time she laboured through that long sonata. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the bed living an imaginary life. She never discussed her ideas with any one. Later she took to more serious reading, and of recent years she has assailed many of the world's greatest problems. Particularly she tells of the influence of Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata'' upon her. During two years she has read it four times and it has convinced her of the shams of character and ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... settles activities of the day and even brings to light valuable inspirations, we have only to subtract from it the dream disguise as a feat of dream-work and a mark of assistance from obscure forces in the depth of the mind (cf. the devil in Tartini's sonata dream). The intellectual task as such must be attributed to the same psychic forces which perform all such tasks during the day. We are probably far too much inclined to over-estimate the conscious character even ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... They played him a sonata—let me see! "Medulla oblongata"—key of G. Then they began to sing That extremely lovely thing, Scherzando! ma non ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... Sonata" that Helen was playing. "It's a pretty piece," observed Lige after a time. John could have choked him, but he answered: "Yes, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington |
