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More "Composer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... colouring, control over his own luxuriance, the sense of tranquillity. He seems to have sought grandeur in size and multitude, richness, eclat, contrast. Being the disciple of Lionardo and Raphael, his defects are truly singular. As a composer, the old leaven of Giovenone remained in him; but he felt the dramatic tendencies of a later age, and in occasional episodes he realised them with a force and furia granted to very few of the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... anthem, he did not come to time, owing to being snowed up on the downs, and the straits they were in through having to make shift with whipcord and twine for strings. He was generally a musician himself, and sometimes a composer in a small way, bringing his own new tunes, and tempting each choir to adopt them for a consideration. Some of these compositions which now lie before me, with their repetitions of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their fugues and their intermediate symphonies, are good singing still, though ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... went into a secret chamber, intending to hide the money which he expected to receive from the whip. Then he said, "Whip, give me a hundred!" and thereupon the whip gave him more than he looked for, making a score on his legs and face like a musical composer, so that Lise, hearing his cries, came running to the spot; and when he saw that the whip, like a runaway horse, could not stop itself, he opened the little box and brought it to a standstill. Then he asked Cianne what had happened to him, and upon hearing his story, he told him he had no ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... chimes certainly ring just as sweetly one time as another. Nevertheless I enjoy them best after the city gets a little bit quiet (which it seldom does until well toward morning). Those chimes, remember, are a replica of the set at Cambridge, England, and play a theme composed by Handel, the old composer." ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... river. Men had gone before us, and were lying in wait there. They stripped us, but afterwards of themselves became sorry, and returned our things. As we were going along this wonderful, fearful river, and beheld the mountains on either side covered with beautiful forests, we remembered Mr. Rhea, the composer of the hymn, 'Valley of Ishtazin.' And when filled with wonder at the works of the Great Creator, we all, with one voice, praised him in songs of joy fitting for the mountains. Here the brethren reminded me, that our dear Miss Fiske had trodden ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... have supposed that this race of vagabonds and outcasts had ever risen much above their traditional occupation of tinkering, far less that any portion of it had displayed original artistic genius. We have, however, from Robert Franz the composer a most interesting account of the wonderful music of the Hungarian gypsies or Tziganys, which he had several opportunities of hearing during a visit to a friend in Hungary. He had been much impressed in his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... composer (or it might be more correct to say composer and author, for in this case music preceded words), Rouget de Lisle—a young aristocrat and an artillery officer—had as a friend a citizen of Strasbourg, to whose house, in the early days of the ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... to be deprecated, if merely for the reason that it may debar a singer from interpreting accurately the composer's ideas. How seldom, if ever, even in the best lyric theatres, is the following passage heard as the ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... incomplete education. The thought may be great and strong, but the execution of it is always feeble and naive.... He had not learned the language of the art. He has all the qualities of imagination, invention, will, which form a great composer; but he does not know the grammar, and can hardly write.... In seeking the great, he has too often found the tumid; seeking the original, he has fallen upon the strange, and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... music of Richard Strauss, whose naturalism is the immediate expression of his robust virility, Hofmannsthal's Electra has made the name of the author known throughout the world. To his association with the sturdy Bavarian composer is also due the comedy Der Rosenkavalier (1911), which with its daring situations and touches of drastic burlesque harks back to the spirit of the comedy of Moliere's time, though in its way it is also a product of the reaction against ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Nevers, Cavannes, and the Catholic nobles have appeared, somewhat prematurely, perhaps, upon the scene. The composer has marked allergo pomposo on the score. The orchestra and the lords proceed allegro indeed, but not at all pomposo, and at the chorus, in the famous scene of the "benediction of the poniards," they no longer keep to the enjoined allegro. Singers and musicians broke away ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... wanting. The statements made in some P.B. manuals that it was so used appear to have arisen from a misunderstanding of an ambiguous sentence of Wheatley's (see 'Liturgical Use,' p. 83). Still, there may have been an arrière pensée in the composer's mind of providing models of prayer and of praise for others, in crisis of trial or deliverance, to offer unto God. It is pleasing to note in this respect, that the thanksgiving is not stinted, ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... since One may be too profuse, the Other [55]over-saving, and the Third (like himself) give it no Relish at all: It may be too sharp, if it exceed a grateful Acid; too Insulse and flat, if the Profusion be extream. From all which it appears, that a Wise-Man is the proper Composer of an excellent Sallet, and how many Transcendences belong to an accomplish'd Sallet-Dresser, so as to emerge an exact Critic indeed, He should be skill'd in the Degrees, Terms, and various Species of Tastes, according to the Scheme set ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... an eye witness, scarcely even a writer who took the history from the narrative of an eye witness. Even if we consider the person who in different places comprehends himself and the Apostle Paul under the word 'we' or 'us' to have been the composer of the whole work, that person was not on the occasion of the occurrence before Damascus as yet in the company of the Apostle. Into this he did not enter until much later, in the Troad, on the Apostle's second missionary journey (Acts xvi., 10). But that hypothesis with regard to the author ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... an intimate friend of Scriabin, telegraphed the news of the composer's death to a friend in England. He stated that Scriabin died of the disease of the lip from which he was suffering when in England last year, and that he had just finished the "wonderful poetical text" of the prologue to his "Mystery." When Scriabin was suffering terrible ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a professional musician. He was a singer and a composer of songs; he wrote poetry in Romaic, and composed tunes to suit rhymes. But it was not thus that he earned his daily bread, and he was poor, very poor. To earn his livelihood he gave lessons, music lessons during the day, and in ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... better that it is resource, and bravery, and being able to think for one's self, that make a physician worth anything. There must be an instinct that recognizes a disease and suggests its remedy, as much as an instinct that finds the right notes and harmonies for a composer of music, or the colors for a true artist's picture, or the results of figures for a mathematician. Men and women may learn these callings from others; may practice all the combinations until they can carry them through with a greater or less degree of unconsciousness of brain ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... by craning her neck a little to avoid the hat of the strikingly dressed young woman in front of her, she could, at least, see the stage. The programme which she held in one hand announced that Miss Agatha Ismay would sing a certain aria from a great composer's oratorio. Miss Rawlinson leaned further forward in her chair when a girl of about her own age, which was twenty-four, slowly advanced to the ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... perplexing. What we understand is good and loving. Let us be sure that what we do not yet understand is good and loving too. The web is of one texture throughout. The least educated ear can catch the music of the simpler melodies which run through the Great Composer's work. We shall one day be able to appreciate the yet fuller music of the more recondite parts, which to us at present seem only jangling and discord. It is not His melody but our ears that are at ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the American composer MacDowell! What a musician! He is sincere and personal—what ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... rough tutelage. At the age of thirteen he entered the office of the Newburyport Herald to learn to set types. At last his boy's hands had found work which his boy's heart did joy to have done. He soon mastered the compositor's art, became a remarkably rapid composer. As he set up the thoughts of others, he was not slow in discovering thoughts of his own demanding utterance. The printer's apprentice felt the stirrings of a new life. A passion for self-improvement took possession ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... greatest difficulties, for a consummate interpretation of a musical work so as to permit an appreciation of its real value, a clear view of its physiognomy, or discernment of its real meaning and true character, is only achieved in relatively few cases. Of creative artists, the composer is almost the only one who is dependent upon a multitude of intermediate agents between the public and himself; intermediate agents, either intelligent or stupid, devoted or hostile, active or inert, capable—from first to last—of contributing ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... Mozart, the celebrated composer, was extremely apprehensive of death, and at all times he laboured under profound melancholy. The circumstances attending the composition of his last piece were remarkable. One day, when his spirits were unusually depressed, a stranger, of a tall dignified appearance, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... great works of literature have shown us dark shades of life beside the light ones. They have spoken of unhappiness and pain as often as of joy. We have suffered with our poets, and in so far as the musical composer expresses the emotions of life the great symphonies have been full of pathos and tragedy. True art has always been selection, but never selection of the beautiful ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... plainer I will use an illustration. Take an author at his writing, a painter at his canvas, a composer listening to the melodies that dawn upon his glad imagination; let any one of these workers pass his daily hours by a wide window looking on a busy street. The power of the animating life blinds sight and hearing alike, and the great traffic ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... nurses; when, if you are paying calls upon a fashionable friend, you are quite apt to be told that she is living at Hull House this month; when a girl whose face generally appears in the society column suddenly comes out as the composer of a new song; when a girl who dances best at balls calmly announces that she is taking a course at the university; when everything nowadays is gone into so seriously, the time has come to look the question of the new woman ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... the surprise, or the originality of the individual who thus appositely introduced this popular fragment from the masterpiece of a favourite composer, produced an electrifying effect upon the young noblemen. They sprang from their chairs, and, at the conclusion of the song, a score of doubloons fell ringing at the feet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... standing now in the aisle dedicated to the memory of that great English composer, Henry Purcell, and thus often called the "Musicians' Aisle," although the memorials to musicians are comparatively few. Purcell's modest tablet with the well-known epitaph, "Here lyes Henry Purcell, Esq., who ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... alias, closely associated with the operatic and musical professions, and most appropriate to the line he has adopted, in the name of "SIGNOR COSTA." The melody of Mr. CHEVALIER's "Coster's Serenade," of which, I rather think, he is the composer as well as librettist, is as charming as it is strikingly original. After the Chevalier sans peur et sans approche had retired, clever and sprightly Miss JENNY HILL gave as a taste of lodging-house-keeperism, following whom came the Two MACS belabouring ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... 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 ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged with autumnal melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and, like all the men of his time and group, produced too much. Yet his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political satire, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... greater number of these poems were in MS. before it occurred to Byron's friend and banker, the Honble. Douglas James William Kinnaird (1788-1830), to make him known to Isaac Nathan (1792-1864), a youthful composer of "musical farces and operatic works," who had been destined by his parents for the Hebrew priesthood, but had broken away, and, after some struggles, succeeded in qualifying himself as ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... carry up his voice in the adjustment for the middle or in phenomenal cases even for the chest register, instead of changing to the head register, more easily than can be done now. In fact, nowadays, when a composer calls for a very high note, it usually is transposed, so that actually the supposedly high C of Di quella pira nearly always is a B flat. Probably there has been no general deterioration in voices, popular opinion to the contrary ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... political thought but also fix the scale of values which must be used in political judgment. One finds oneself when trying to realise this, falling back (perhaps because one gets so little help from current language) upon Plato's favourite metaphor of the arts. In music the noble and the base composer are not divided by the fact that the one appeals to the intellect and the other to the feelings of his hearers. Both must make their appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realise intensely the feelings ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... Garden, and many a musician of less fame had come to try his fortune. But we had had neither of the acknowledged masters of the piano, the founders of the modern school of playing—Liszt and Thalberg. Liszt, spoiled and capricious, played very seldom. Chopin, more a composer than a performer, we in America had never supposed would cross the sea: so sensitive, so delicate, so shadowy, his life seemed to exhale, a passionate sigh of music. In the stormy, blood-soaked, ruined Paris of to-day it is not easy to imagine those ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... present it was Beethoven, whose art unfolded itself before him, and now that his own knowledge was firmly grounded, aided him to become a composer. "I doubt whether there has ever been a young musician more familiar with Beethoven's works than was Wagner, then eighteen years of age," says Dorn of this period. Wagner himself says in his "Deutscher Musiker in Paris:" "I knew no greater pleasure ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... barracks for infantry. The portal of the church was built in 1739, and is composed of columns of the ionic and corinthian orders. The interior has some handsomely decorated chapels and altars; the pictures by Vanloo also are fine. Lulli, the musical composer, lies buried here. In the Rue Notre-Dame des Victoires is the immense establishment of the Messageries Royales, from whence start diligences to all parts of France; we will pass through the yard into the Rue Montmartre, at No. 44, is the Marche St. ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... published by William Reeves, London, in 1879). This was the first serious attempt at a biography of Chopin. The author reproduced in the book what had been brought to light in Polish magazines and other publications regarding Chopin's life by various countrymen of the composer, among whom he himself was not the least notable. But the most valuable ingredients are, no doubt, the Chopin letters which the author obtained from the composer's relatives, with whom he was acquainted. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... hours we were safely landed at the Fondamenti nuovi, and went immediately to the Mendicanti, where they were performing the oratorio of Sisera. The composer, a young man, had displayed great fire and originality in this performance; and a knowledge of character seldom found in the most celebrated masters. The supplication of the thirsty chieftain, and Jael's insinuating ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Fichte, Schleiermacher—had long passed away. Heinrich Heine died in Paris in 1856. Frederick Nietzsche was a youth, Richard Wagner's "Tannhaeuser" had just been greeted, in the presence of the composer, with a storm of hisses in the Opera house at Paris. The social condition of Germany may be partially realized if one remembers that the death-rate was over 28 per mille, as compared with 17 per mille to-day; that only a start had been made with railway construction; that the country, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... old lady joining us, which she eventually did with much coughing and protestation; but I noticed that she finished the tumblerful. For the children he concocted a marvellous mixture, which he called an "eye-composer," the chief ingredients being hot lemonade, ginger wine, sugar, oranges, and raspberry vinegar. It had the ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... desert of blighted literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost without the offices of the composer. ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... love of music," he began. "I left the colony of Virginia with the intention of going to London, to perfect my study of that divine art, under the direction of Orlando Gibbons. He is very young to be a composer, but he is ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... row of the upper circle a woman with a restless starling-voice was discussing the work of a temporarily fashionable composer, chiefly in relation to her own emotions, which she seemed to think might prove generally interesting ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... homophony; euphony, euphonism[obs3]; tonality; consonance; consent; part. [Science of harmony] harmony, harmonics; thorough-bass, fundamental- bass; counterpoint; faburden[obs3]. piece of music &c. 415[Fr]; composer, harmonist[obs3], contrapuntist (musician) 416. V. be harmonious &c. adj.; harmonize, chime, symphonize[obs3], transpose; put in tune, tune, accord, string. Adj. harmonious, harmonical[obs3]; in concord &c. n., in tune, in concert; unisonant[obs3], concentual[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... with ancient fragments of architecture and sculpture. The row of houses opposite to the museum is doomed to demolition, a process which has begun already at the north end. The house third from the south end, a small grocer's shop, is the one in which the great composer and musician Purcell lived. He was born in Great St. Ann's Lane near the Almonry, and his mother, as a widow, lived in Tothill Street. The boy at the very early age of six was admitted to the choir ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... correlates of the rhapsodia. This being the poem adapted to chanting, those were the chanters. And the only important question which we can imagine to arise is, How far in any given age we may presume the functions of the poetical composer and the musical deliverer to have been united. We cannot perceive that any possible relation between a rhapsody considered as a section of a poem and the whole of that poem, or any possible relation which this same rhapsody considered as a thing to be sung ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... It was ascertained from the parents that this boy, at an age when most children are reading fairy stories, had a passion for standard medical literature and textbooks in physical science. Yet, after more than a year of daily contact with this young genius (who is a relative of Meyerbeer, the composer), the teacher had discovered no symptoms ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... a kind of cross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we should not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the majesty and compass of the organ. He was as much composer as poet. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... popular theorist and composer, Kapellmeister at St. Stephen's in Vienna, for some time, about the year 1795, Beethoven's instructor in ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... of manufactures, particularly those of luxury, are peculiar to the metropolis, and one of the most prominent of this class is public amusement. Every season has its novelty, whether the opera of a great foreign composer, or the lectures of a literary lion; besides endless panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas, and cycloramas, which bring home to John Bull the wonders of the habitable globe, and annihilate time and space for his delectation. We see the Paris ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... the original says: "The name of the composer of the above song was not given because he was of obscure rank," a reason which will sound strange ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... to be director of her lessons in singing, and also permitted him to write German letters for her; and what assistance worthy of all gratitude he had enjoyed through the director of the imperial musicians, Gombert, the composer and leader of the royal orchestra, and his colleague Appenzelder, who ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... skill as he showed in playing, but he had a charming voice which he used with great ease, and he never sang a single note, or phrased a passage, without complete intelligence and understanding of his composer. Only he lacked power. This scarcely interfered with the pleasure he could give in a drawing-room, and to-night both Levillier and Julian were rather in a mood for supreme delicacy than for great passion. They listened with silent pleasure for a time. ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... crowning joy, an orgy of happiness, Massimilla pillowed Emilio's head in her arms, and now and then ventured to press her lips to his; but only as a bird dips its beak into the clear waters of a spring, looking round lest it should be seen. Their fancy worked upon this kiss, as a composer develops a subject by the endless resources of music, and it produced in them such tumultuous and vibrating echoes as ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... Mendelssohn Bartholdy for instance, though not a composer, was evidently a man of genius, a philosopher of considerable intellectual capacity and moral strength. The father of the composer was a rich banker at Berlin, and he used to say: "When I was young I was the son of the great ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... before my aunt, proved to contain three carrots and two onions, carefully washed, and shining; they were the kindly fruits of the earth, and of the prophet's own labor, and my old auntie was deeply touched, because it appeared that this visitor was a seer, the sole composer of a mighty tome which is to be found in the public library, and is ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... was forty-five years of age at the death of his father. He did not possess his father's brilliant genius or power of personal influence, but was fondly devoted to the fine arts, himself a talented painter and composer. He was a hard worker, and also fond of the pleasures of life. His health was injured through illness, in 1857, and he never recovered. The premature death of his second son, Prince Gustavus, a talented composer and highly popular, had a disastrous effect on him, and he died ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... she had always been told a little bleeding of that sort was good for hot-headed young people. Then the singer took complete hold of her. The composer, to balance the delightful part of Marguerite, has given Siebel a melody with which wonders can be done; and the Klosking had made a considerable reserve of her powers for this crowning effort. After a recitative that rivaled the silver trumpet, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... the celebrated composer, who declares that he once saw a pigeon which could distinguish a particular air. Lockman was visiting a Mr. Lee in Cheshire, whose daughter was a fine pianist, "and whenever she played the air of Speri si from Handel's ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... artists, for friends and well-wishers were admitted, and had here an opportunity of entertaining their ideas in a sociable and agreeable manner. Besides those on the regular Staff of Punch, there were members of the club Mr. Grieve the scene-painter, Mr. Henry Baylis, Mr. Tully the composer,[9] Mr. Joseph Allen the artist, and I have seen in addition Mr. Charles Dickens, Mr. Stanfield, Mr. Frank Stone, Mr. Landseer, and other celebrities, in that little snug and comfortable room. Here the inimitable Douglas Jerrold was in his glory, showing ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 7. William Billings, First New England composer, organizer of singing societies, etc. Billings died ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... kind that Lettice rejoiced in exceedingly, and that Alan loved without quite knowing why. The Tannhauser Overture, the Walkueren-Ritt, two of Schubert's loveliest songs, and the less exciting but more easily comprehensible productions of an earlier classical composer, were the chief items of the first part of the concert. Then came an interval, after which the rest of the afternoon would be devoted to the Choral Symphony. But during this interval Alan hastened to make the ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... It rhymes with "sue," "eyes of blue," "woo," and all sorts of succulent things, easily fitted into the fabric of a lyric. And it has the enormous advantage that it can be repeated thrice at the end of a refrain when the composer has given you those three long notes, which is about all a composer ever thinks of. When a composer hands a lyricist a "dummy" for a ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Eliza's earlier novels to the good graces of scandal-loving readers, for she describes a certain letter as "amorous as Mrs. O—- F—-d's Eyes, or the Writings of the Author of Love in Excess." Most curious of all is the fact that the composer of the four letters, who signs herself J.B., refers en passant to Belinda's inconstancy to Sir Thomas Worthly, an allusion to the story of the second part of "The British Recluse." This reference would indicate either that ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... modesty did not prevent him from going from group to group for his meed of praise; and when there was no more to be said about the singer, he returned to the subject of the song, discussing its difficulties or extolling the composer. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... volume and variety of tone, in complexity of rhythm and tune, till it grew at length into a symphony so august, so solemn, and so profound, that there is nothing I know of in our music here to which I can fitly compare it. It reminded me, however, of Wagner more than of any other composer, in the richness of its colour, the insistence and force of its rhythms, its fragments of ineffable melody, and above all, its endless chromatic sequences, for ever suggesting but never actually reaching the ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... who has little time for golf nowadays, finds his most refreshing recreation in reading the speeches of Lord NORTHCLIFFE, co-ordinating them with those of BURKE and PERICLES, and setting them to music in the style of HANDEL, his favourite composer. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... future; a young man whose music-loving family gave him every possible opportunity, and who produced some charming and even joyous songs during the long struggle with tuberculosis which preceded his death, had made a brave beginning, not only as a teacher of music but as a composer. In the little service held at Hull-House in his memory, when the children sang his composition, "How Sweet is the Shepherd's Sweet Lot," it was hard to realize that such an interpretive pastoral could have been produced ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... The German composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was not only a musical genius, but was also one of the pre-eminent geniuses of the Western world. He defined in his music a system of musical thought and an entire state of mind that were unlike any ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... tarirait pas si on voulait rapporter tout ce que les Russes firent de memorable dans cette journee; pour conter les hauts faits d'armes, pour particulariser toutes les actions d'eclat, il faudrait composer ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... {219} Such was the life, such the death, and such were the funeral obsequies of Ryley Bosvil, a Gipsy who will be long remembered amongst the English Romany for his buttons, his two wives, grand airs, and last not least, for having been the composer of various stanzas in the Gipsy tongue, which have plenty of force if nothing else to recommend them. One of these, addressed to Yocky Shuri, runs ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... German lieder of a more contemporaneous cast. Then his aunt asked him for that last sweet little thing of his own. "I don't believe Bertie has ever heard a composer sing ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... solicited the aid of Sir Arthur Sullivan. But it so happened that Sir Arthur's most famous composition, "The Lost Chord," had been taken without leave by American music publishers, and sold by the hundreds of thousands with the composer left out on pay-day. Sir Arthur held forth on this injustice, and said further that no accurate copy of "The Lost Chord" had, so far as he knew, ever been printed in the United States. Bok saw his chance, and also an opportunity ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... black-haired girl awaited a call to fame. He called Constance by name, again and again, then, receiving no answer, he dashed up the stairs, encountering the object of his search at the very height of his alarm. Marjorie Dean stood on guard beside her. She advanced toward the excited composer, saying briefly, "Let her alone, Laurie. She's awfully nervous and upset. She has just had a dreadful fright. I'll ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... all musicians should be at liberty to assume names provided they were appropriate. But for a composer to call himself Johann Sebastian Wagner was to court disaster. He ventured to submit the following list for the benefit of persons who contemplated making the change. For a soprano: Miss Hyam Seton. For a contralto: Miss Ritchie Plummer. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... what he called "coming to a tragic end." This is what is to be read, on the subject of his dramatic triumphs, in 1483, in the accounts of the "Ordinary:" "To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter and composer, who have made and composed the mystery made at the Chatelet of Paris, at the entry of Monsieur the Legate, and have ordered the personages, clothed and dressed the same, as in the said mystery was required; and likewise, for having made the scaffoldings thereto necessary; and ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... of the productions which followed one another at the theatre throughout the year; but he felt, nevertheless, a sort of proprietary interest in these ventures, and was pleased when they secured the approval of the public. Last night's opening, a musical piece by an American author and composer, had undoubtedly made a big hit, and Mac was glad, because he liked what he had seen of the company, and, in the brief time in which he had known him, had come to entertain a warm regard for George Bevan, ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... article on Sir EDWARD ELGAR in a new musical journal, Music and Letters. Sir EDWARD ELGAR has a great following; he has written oratorios; he is an O.M.; yet Mr. SHAW salutes him as the greatest English composer, the true lineal descendant of BEETHOVEN, one of the Immortals and the only candidate for Westminster Abbey! To find Mr. SHAW taking a majority view is bad enough; it is a case of proving false to the tradition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... the playwright, who is a sub-novelist) has been taking the bread out of the mouths of other artists. In the matter of poaching, the painter has done a lot, and the composer has done more, but what the painter and the composer have done is as naught compared to the grasping deeds of the novelist. And whereas the painter and the composer have got into difficulties with their audacious ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... the French, to whose genius they are better suited than to the British. An analogy may be observed between all the different departments of the belles lettres; and none seem more closely allied, than the pursuits of the dramatic writer, and those of the composer of romances or novels. Both deal in fictitious adventure; both write for amusement; and address themselves nearly to the same class of admirers. Nay, although the pride of the dramatist may be offended by the assertion, it would seem, that the nature of ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... presentation, has been worked out through centuries of free experimentation on the part of some of the best minds in the world, and thus any great musical composition is an intellectual achievement of high rank. Behind the sensuous factors, sound and rhythm, lies always the personal message of the composer, and if we are to grasp this and to make it our own, we must go with him hand in hand so that the music actually lives again in our minds and imaginations. The practical inference from this dual nature of the art we are considering is clear; everyone can derive a large ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... a perpetual creation. In the former case the relation of God to the world is made an external relation; in the latter, an internal one. In the one the world is thought of as a clock, which once wound up runs on mechanically, in the second it is likened to a piece of music which the composer himself recites. If God preserves created things by continually recreating them they are not substances at all; if they are substances, preservation becomes an empty word, which we repeat after the theologians without giving ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... note and study the marvellous effects of sound in the building. Listen, if possible, from the Lady Chapel, to an anthem by some old composer; listen to Bach's G minor fugue from the triforium of the choir, and hear the echoes rolling from pier to pier; listen to the Hallelujah Chorus sung on some great festival service in the nave, or some simple well-known hymn sung ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... interpreter of emotion, it calls into play the higher faculties; its language is that of sentiment Furthermore, the motives which have presided over particular musical combinations establish links between the 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet. He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write it. "I reckon it," he wrote in 1781, "among my principal advantages, as a composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen years, and but one these thirteen years." So mild was his interest in his contemporaries that he had never heard Collins's name till he read about him in Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Though descended from ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... wished to participate in this festival, which was to render homage to the veteran German composer, the great Joseph Haydn, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth performance of the maestro's great work, "The Creation." Ten years had elapsed since the first performance of "The Creation" at Vienna, and already the sublime ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... his songs. Ah, how did it go?" and Mrs. Hilbery, who had a very sweet voice, trolled out a famous lyric of her father's which had been set to an absurdly and charmingly sentimental air by some early Victorian composer. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... been playing, count?" asked Marie Antoinette. "I beg your pardon, if I leave your question unanswered," replied the count, with a gentle inclination of the head. "Your majesty has such a fine ear, that you must doubtless recognize the composer in the music. It is an entirely new composition, and I have taken the license of arranging it for four hands. If your majesty would ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... solemn commemoration in the Cathedral at Reims of the triumph of the peasant-girl of Domremy. He was a schoolfellow at St.-Sulpice and has been a lifelong friend of Gounod, and upon his suggestion the great French composer produced for the commemoration his Mass of Jeanne d'Arc. He came from Paris himself to superintend the execution of the music. Simple, grand, choral, in the manner of Palestrina, music of the cathedral, not of the concert, I must ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... are the typical and representative men of the race, and whatever is true of them is true, in a lesser degree, of men in general. There is in the work of every great sculptor, painter, writer, composer, architect, a distinctive and individual manner so marked and unmistakable as to identify the man whenever and wherever a bit of his work appears. If a statue of Phidias were to be found without any mark of the sculptor upon it, there ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... hunting butterflies or dissecting rats are more suitable pursuits for young Percival Johnson than doing scram practice up against the playground wall. It may well be that it would be a far, far better thing for mob adoration to be laid at the feet of the composer of the winning Greek Iambic rather than at the cricketing boots of the Captain of the Eleven. It may be so, but, then, most assuredly it ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... handbook cannot be doubted. Its pages are packed full of these fascinating renderings. The accounts of each composer are succinct and yet sufficient. The author has done a genuine service to the world of music lovers. The comprehension of orchestral work of the highest character is aided efficiently by this volume. The mechanical ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... my possession, which contain some well-known verses in his own hand, and written in such a manner, that it was very evident, from the blotting and interlining, that they had not been transcribed from a copy, nor dictated by another, but were written by the composer of them. ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... use in the specialised work of their profession, but by which their conversation profits. More 'literary' than many 'men of letters' (we were not aware at this period that M. Legrandin had a distinct reputation as a writer, and so were greatly astonished to find that a well-known composer had set some verses of his to music), endowed with a greater ease in execution than many painters, they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... this on the eastern side was occupied for many years by the artistic family of the Lawsons. Thomas Attwood, a pupil of Mozart and himself a great composer, died there in 1838. The house had formerly a magnificent garden, to the mulberries of which Hazlitt makes allusion in one of his essays. No. 18 was the home of the famous Don Saltero's museum. This man, correctly Salter, was a servant of Sir Hans Sloane, and his collection was ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... prove to be stunted, deformed, or weakly. It is his own—no man has begot it before him—and he can take no interest in anything else, until it is completed. Is this not true of the Painter, as he stands with his charcoal in hand thinking out his picture for next year's Academy?—of the Composer, seated before his piano and running his fingers with apparent want of design over the keys?—of the Author, as he walks to and fro and plans the details of his new plot?—of the Poet, as he gazes up into the skies ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... is cast upon the canvas, too little is laid aside, so that the poems run to a length which weakens instead of strengthening the main impression. A number of the poems have, that is, the faults of a composer whose fancy runs away with him, who does not ride it as a master; and in whom therefore, for a time, imagination has gone to sleep. Moreover, only too often, they have those faults of composition which naturally belong to a poet when he writes as if intellect rather than passion were the ultimate ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... certain traits of his physiognomy, which enable us to distinguish him from others. The illusion is less easy as regards musical expression; because it would seem strange to everyone to say that the composer had added or attached notes to the motive, which is already in the mind of him who is not the composer. As if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony were not his own intuition and his own intuition the Ninth Symphony. Thus, just as he who is deceived as to his material wealth is confuted by arithmetic, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... great nicety of the Greeks, in the ordering and disposing their dances, I refer to what I have before said, for its being to be observed, how much at present this art is fallen short of their perfection in it, and how difficult it must be for a composer of dances to produce them in that masterly manner they were used to be performed among the antients. Let his talent for invention or composition be never so rich or fertile, it will be impossible for him ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... best one! Such a simply sumptuous storyette for you! Even in your remote fastnesses you must have heard of young Ivan Rowdidowsky, the very very latest thing in Russian composer-pianists. Playing the piano with his elbows, dressed in scarlet velvet, and fuller of "inner meanings" than anyone (even from Russia) ever was before, he captured London at the beginning of the Little Season, and his vogue has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... letter from a friend in Boston who had lately heard a great chorus rendered. He could not be quite sure of the name of the composer because he had read the letter hurriedly and his friend was a blind-writer, but that made no difference to Harry. He could fill in facts enough about the grandeur of the music from his own imagination to make up for the lack of a little matter like the ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... that I picked up the most unique art treasure I found anywhere on my travels—a picture of the composer Verdi that looked exactly like Uncle Joe Cannon, without the cigar; whereas Uncle Joe Cannon does not look a thing in the world like Verdi, and probably wouldn't if ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... beauty and talent gained such extensive celebrity, was so much pleased with this African song, and the kind feelings in which it originated, that she put it into English verse, and employed an eminent composer ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... like pearls, rolling off the magic wand of the Violin Wizard, whose delicate dark face, now slightly flushed with the glow of inspiration, seemed to reflect by its very expression the various phases of the mighty composer's thought! Alwyn half closed his eyes and listened entranced, allowing his soul to drift like an oarless boat on the sweeping waves of the music's will. He was under the supreme sway of two Emperors ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... expression of and an appeal to the common multitude, a whole people, the mass. Fiction and painting, and even poetry, are affairs of the classes, reaching the groups of the educated. But music—ah, that is different, it is one soul speaking to another soul. The composer meant it for you and himself. No one else has anything to do with it. Because his soul was heavy and broken with grief, or bursting with passion, or tortured with doubt, or searching for some unnamed ideal, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Sintons' on Saturday and practised all the time she could there, while Margaret watched the road to see that Mrs. Comstock was not coming. She had become so skilful that it was a delight to hear her play music of any composer, but when she played her own, that was joy inexpressible, for then the wind blew, the water rippled, the Limberlost sang her songs of sunshine, shadow, black ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... landscape painter would not make a primary study of Angelo's anatomical drawings; a composer of lyric forms of music would not study Sousa's marches; nor would a person writing a story look for much assistance in the arguments of Burke. The most direct benefit is derived from studying the very thing one wishes ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Rafael knew the music: a Lied by Schubert—the favorite composer of the day; a master "whose best work was still unknown," as she said in the cant she had learned from the critics, alluding to the fact that only the least subtle of the melancholy composer's works had thus far ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in the scene greatly impaired its theatrical effect, the approbation with which it was notwithstanding received by all judges of music on its first representation in Vienna (10th Oct. 1823) sufficiently attested the triumph of the composer over his difficulties. He was repeatedly called for and received with the loudest acclamations. From Vienna, where he was conducting his Euryanthe, he was summoned to Prague, to superintend the fiftieth representation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... (?1774-1856), the great tenor and the composer of "The Death of Nelson." Lamb praised him again in his Elia essay "Imperfect Sympathies," and later wrote an amusing article on Braham's recantation of Hebraism (see "The Religion of Actors," Vol. I.). "Kais," ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... every drama. This continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose! Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the situation was summed up in Wagner's famous phrase, "The means of expression (music) has been made the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... itself with the same sweet history of the inglenook which is the basis of the Bluebeard libretto. Strauss's symphony is worked out along more tranquil lines, to be sure, but it is only the history of a single day of married life and a day arbitrarily chosen by the composer. It is conceivable that there may have ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of Israel, who is represented as having "saved it from its enemies on every side," was after all, probably only a spiritual saviour of the souls of the Israelites, by having distinguished himself as a prophet, a preacher of righteousness, and a composer of Psalms!! [fn22] ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... was not aware that they had ever been printed. She wrote them down merely by ear, and afterwards translated Me cal Mouri into English (see page 57). The ballad was very popular, and was set to music. She did not then know the name of the composer, but when she ascertained that the poet was "one Jasmin of Agen," she resolved to go out of her way and call upon him, when on her journey to the Pyrenees about two years later.{3} She had already heard much about him before she arrived, as he was regarded ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... heard how the wife of a well-known Norwegian composer, in a fit of raging jealousy excited by her husband's prolonged absence from home, burnt the manuscript of a symphony which he had just finished. The circumstances under which Hedda burns Lovborg's ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... are the literally translated truth, cannot be patient with the gloss and varnish of our, at best, imperfect language. Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be only the conviction of our heart we venture to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... of the lady, one can aver that she is graced with a diatonic figure. And, certainly the most amusing passage of "Sinfonia Domestica" is that complex of Bavarian lustihood, Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess and Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that serves as autoportrait of the composer. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... crowns of Aragon, Navarre, and Naples. "Plusieurs dames," says Mignot,[140] "attachées à la Reine, lui indiquèrent un breuvage qu'il fallait, disoit on donner à Ferdinand pour ranimer ses forces. Cette princese fit composer ce reméde, sous ses yeux, et le présenta au roi qui désirait, plus qu'elle, d'avoir un fils. Depuis ce jour, la santé de Ferdinand s'affaiblit, au point qu'il ne la ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... An almost too vivacious rendering of the Venusberg music brought the scheme to a strepitous conclusion. It may, however, be submitted that so realistic an interpretation of the Pagan revelries depicted by the composer is hardly in accordance with the best traditions of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... Perhaps the part had not yet {47} been clearly enough evolved from the conditions of the time, and George, even when he had the best intentions, was always lapsing back into the way of his predecessors. George was a great letter-writer. To adopt a modern phrase, he "fancied himself" as a composer of State papers. It seems marvellous now that a man so lazy by nature should have found the time to pen so many documents of the kind. Perhaps even in the most commonplace ways of life we are often compelled to wonder at the amount of work a man habitually lazy ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... wild over Donald Tovey's songs. He played, and Tommy sang them from memory, and it seemed as if they had been written then and there, struck off at white heat; as if the composer happened to be at the piano, and the singer chanced with his help to be interpreting those particular verses for ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them; not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... XIV. On the occasion of this brilliant fete, several ladies of the court were amongst the performers, and it was resolved that they should in future be replaced by professional danseuses, the female characters in the ballet having previously been sustained by men." Lully, the celebrated composer, was manager of the opera house, where he amassed a very large fortune. He made himself greatly dreaded by his orchestra, whom he used to belabour over the head with his fiddle. In this manner he is said to have broken scores of violins, and one unlucky clarionet-player, in particular, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... and will always awaken the boundless enthusiasm of those who go only to be diverted. But these are only the ornaments of the drama; to understand the drama itself requires a serious effort on the part of the hearer which few are prepared to make, a moral sympathy with the composer and receptive understanding of his aims of which ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... do not hold that up to you for a model of prose. Still, lucidity rather than emotion being its aim, I doubt not that the composer spent pains on it; more pains than it would have cost him to convey his ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Sacred, for a single voice adjusted to the particular compass of mine; with a thorough base on ye ghitarr by Cesare Morelli. Several songs composed by Pepys are in this collection, one of which, entitled Beauty Retire, was a great success, and the composer was very proud of it. All the books in the library are in excellent condition, and, with the exception of a few in morocco or vellum, are bound in calf. Almost all of them bear Pepys's arms on the lower cover; while on the upper is found a shield with the inscription, SAM. PEPYS CAR. ET IAC. ANGL. ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very capable performer, but a composer of no ordinary merit. All the afternoon he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long thin fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes were as ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... under considerable disadvantages that they are genealogically descended from him. But the man is better pictured in these stories than in any number of modern realistic trivialities about his favourite breakfast and his favourite musical composer. Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. If we read of a man who could make green grass red and turn the sun into the moon, we may not believe these ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... go to the "Galette," go with a Parisian or some of the students of the Quarter; but if you must go alone—keep your eyes on the band. It is a good band, too, and its chef d'orchestre, besides being a clever musical director, is a popular composer as well. ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... people have been developing a tenderness and pathos that really grips one's heart. The music was composed by a man by the name of Dedler, about one hundred years ago, and while it gives expression to the composer's tender heart, yet experts say that it reminds them of Hayden and Mozart. The paintings in the building are those of great masters. It took an entire year to paint the scenery for the play in 1910, but they could not afford to spend so much upon ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... of the character In the second version of "Evelyn Innes" there is more of Mr. Russell than of Mr. Yeats in Ulick Dean, at least in his appearance and sayings, though Mr. Moore could not divest his composer of the personality of Mr. Yeats. There is less of Ireland in "Sister Theresa" (1901) than in "Evelyn Innes," but "The Untilled Field," short stories written after the removal of Mr. Moore to Dublin and gathered ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Idyll," and "From Puritan Days" can be played between the episodes and the Dance Interlude. An orchestra or piano can add to the music of Faunch's fiddle in the Merrymount scene. The music for the procession should be very stately, and by a seventeenth-century composer, if possible. ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... should yet have the power to make a great lady suffer. For a great lady I knew Ysolinde to be even then, when her father seemed to be no more in the city of Thorn than Master Gerard, the fount and treasure-house of law and composer-general of quarrels. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... paid Mrs. Grote a visit at Burnham Beeches. Our party consisted only of my sister and myself; the Viennese composer, Dessauer; and Chorley, the musical critic of the Athenaeum, who was very intimately acquainted with us all. The eccentricities of our hostess, with which some of us were already tolerably familiar, were a source of unfeigned ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of fourteen, was the best of all the pupils of the Maestro Porpora, a famous Italian composer, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... be incredible if it were not true. His brief and dim experience of married life seems hardly to have affected him. As a critic of art and ethics, as the writer of facile magnificent sentences, full of beauty and rhythm, as the composer of word-structures, apparently logical in form but deeply prejudiced and inconsequent in thought, he became one of the great influences of the day, and wielded not only power but real domination. The widespread delusion of the English educated classes, that they are interested in art, was of Ruskin's ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of January, George Herbert Rodwell, the celebrated composer and writer, was removed from among the living. His musical compositions and stage productions were numerous ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the first letter to Novello, who was the peculiar champion of Mozart and Haydn. Lamb calls him Corelli after Archangelo Corelli (1653-1713), the violinist and composer. It was part of a joke between Lamb and Novello that Lamb should affect to know a great deal about music. See the Elia essay "A Chapter on Ears" for a description of Novello's playing. Mrs. Novello was the mother of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... becoming known as a song-writer; he cultivated his gift to relieve the monotony of an unintellectual occupation, and the usual auditor of his lays was his younger brother Matthew, who for some years was his companion in the workshop. The acquaintance of Robert Archibald Smith, the celebrated musical composer, which he was now fortunate in forming, was the means of stimulating his Muse to higher efforts and of awakening his ambition. Smith was at this period resident in Paisley; and along with one Ross, a teacher of music from Aberdeen, he set ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... contours; but these it would not be difficult to match in any morning's walk. It is when she smiles that her face, it seems to me, is one of the most wonderful in the world. Till she smiles, it is like the score of some great composer's song before the musician releases it warbling for joy along the trembling keys; it is like the statue of Memnon before the dawn steals to kiss it across the desert. White Soul's face when she smiles is made, you would say, of larks and dew, of ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... meaningless enough to have been written by a Russian." This latter is to be preferred, for it leads your companion to say, "But don't you like TschaiKOWsky?", pronouncing the second syllable as if the composer were a female bull. You can then reply, "Why, yes, TschaiKOFFsky DID write some rather good music—although it's all neurotic and obviously Teutonic." Don't fail to ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... from forming any definite opinion of it. There was, as it were, a continual beginning, a preparation of the musical expression of some feeling, but it fell to pieces again directly, breaking into new musical motives, or simply nothing but the whims of the composer, exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these fragmentary musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable, because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the first time," Louis d'Arandel said, with the look of a man who was dreaming and trying to recollect something, "I thought of some slow and yet passionate music that I once heard, though I do not remember who was the composer, where there was a fair-haired woman, whose hair was so silky, so golden, and so vibrating, that her lover had it cut off after her death, and had the strings of the magic bow of a violin made out of it, which afterwards emitted such superhuman ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... are more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged with autumnal melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and, like all the men of his time and group, produced too much. Yet his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in quantity; ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... a simply sumptuous storyette for you! Even in your remote fastnesses you must have heard of young Ivan Rowdidowsky, the very very latest thing in Russian composer-pianists. Playing the piano with his elbows, dressed in scarlet velvet, and fuller of "inner meanings" than anyone (even from Russia) ever was before, he captured London at the beginning of the Little Season, and his vogue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... of music were invaded by the dispute between the adherents of the King and the adherents of the prince. The King and Queen were supporters {51} of Handel, the prince was against the great composer. The prince in the first instance declared against Handel because his sister Anne, the Princess of Orange, was one of Handel's worshippers, therefore a great number of the nobility who sided with the prince set up, or at least supported, a rival opera-house to that in which Handel's ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the Kaiser said to the King of Prussia: 'There is Noverre, the famous Composer of Ballets; he has been in Berlin, I believe.' Noverre made thereupon a beautiful dancing-master bow. 'Ah, I know him,' said the King: 'we saw him at Berlin; he was very droll; mimicked all the world, especially our chief Dancing Women, to make you split with laughing.' Noverre, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... victims the most eminent was Tschaikovsky, the composer, a man of genius and a most charming character, to whom Mr. Andrew Carnegie had introduced me at New York. One evening at a dinner-party he poured out a goblet of water from a decanter on the table, drank it down, and next day was dead from ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... of dressing the hair and deforming the body. It has determined what animals, or what special race of an animal species, should be petted. It controls music and literature, so that a composer, poet, or novelist is the rage or is forgotten. In mediaeval literature the modes of allegory were highly esteemed and very commonly used. The writers described war and battles over and over again, and paid little attention to nature. In fact, natural background, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... substitute. I have pictured to myself an illustration: A bright young man is present at a grand concert. It is between the parts. He bends suavely over the back of a lady's chair and talks sweet music to her ear. He says: "Could you not follow every thought of the composer in that symphony?" (which they have just heard). "And was not the effect sublime when the storm reached the heights of the mountains, and all the elements of Nature struggled so stubbornly?" And the young woman demurely gives ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... were all handsome, but she who did Cenerentola surpassed them all; she was a perfect beauty and a grace. I think the music of this opera would please the public taste in England. Rossini seems to have banished every other musical composer ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... will naturally do so on a vocational basis, and the question is not of the aim to be sought, but the much easier one of the means of its attainment, since there is no more of a puzzle in teaching an embryo composer or music teacher than there is in teaching ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... (like himself) give it no Relish at all: It may be too sharp, if it exceed a grateful Acid; too Insulse and flat, if the Profusion be extream. From all which it appears, that a Wise-Man is the proper Composer of an excellent Sallet, and how many Transcendences belong to an accomplish'd Sallet-Dresser, so as to emerge an exact Critic indeed, He should be skill'd in the Degrees, Terms, and various Species of Tastes, according to the Scheme set ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... Chopin though not an anchorite resembled Flaubert, being both proud and timid; he led a detached life, hence his art was bold and violent. Unlike Liszt he seldom sought the glamor of the theatre, and was never in such public view as his maternal admirer, Sand. He was Frederic Francois Chopin, composer, teacher of piano and a lyric genius of ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... some importance to her. Besides, by craning her neck a little to avoid the hat of the rather strikingly dressed young woman in front of her, she could, at least, see the stage. The programme which she held in one hand announced that Miss Agatha Ismay would sing a certain aria from a great composer's oratorio, and she leaned further forward in her chair when a girl of about her own age, which was twenty-four, slowly advanced to the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... was startled by a sudden clangour among the bass-notes—the music seemed to be jumbled into confusion, and the ear was stunned by a painful and intolerable dissonance. On looking more intently, he perceived that the composer had let one hand fall abstractedly upon the key-board, while the other executed, by itself, a passage of extraordinary difficulty and involution. Then, for the first time, the thought struck him that the musician was deaf.[17] Alas! the supposition was too true: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... could; so the programme was changed. The frog is a diligent songster, having a good voice but no ear. The libretto of his favorite opera, as written by Aristophanes, is brief, simple and effective—"brekekex-koax"; the music is apparently by that eminent composer, Richard Wagner. Horses have a frog in each hoof—a thoughtful provision of nature, enabling them to shine in a ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the officers' roll are well-known Britishers who have given their lives for their country. There was Rupert Brooke, the poet; Denis Browne, formerly musical critic of The Times; F. S. Kelly, holder of the Diamond Sculls record, who also was an exceptionally clever composer and pianist; and Arthur Waldene St. Clair Tisdall, a great scholar and poet of Cambridge. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his valour on the 25th of April, at Gallipoli, for going to the rescue of ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... praiseworthy efforts. An almost too vivacious rendering of the Venusberg music brought the scheme to a strepitous conclusion. It may, however, be submitted that so realistic an interpretation of the Pagan revelries depicted by the composer is hardly in accordance with the best traditions of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... were safely landed at the Fondamenti nuovi, and went immediately to the Mendicanti, where they were performing the oratorio of Sisera. The composer, a young man, had displayed great fire and originality in this performance; and a knowledge of character seldom found in the most celebrated masters. The supplication of the thirsty chieftain, and Jael's insinuating arts and pious treachery, are admirably expressed; but the agitation and bodily ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Nathaniel Hawthorne was devoid of that useful ability. Nor had he been able to spend less than he earned; so, suddenly, there he was on his beam-ends. Leisure to write, certainly, was now abundant enough; but he never was a rapid composer, and even had he been so, the market for the kind of things he wrote was, in the middle of the past century, in New England, neither large nor eager. The emoluments were meagre to match; twenty dollars for four pages of the Democratic Review was about the figure; and to produce a short tale ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... his slightest sketches are astonishingly and commandingly expressive. Other of his drawings were worked out and pondered over almost as lovingly as his completest pictures. But so instinctively and inevitably was he a composer that everything he touched is a complete whole—his merest sketch or his most elaborated design is a unit. He has left no fragments. His paintings, his countless drawings, his few etchings and woodcuts are all of a piece. About everything there is that air of finality which marks the work destined ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... Pieces we don't discover one single Trace of the Author of the Fox and Alchemist: but in the wild extravagant Notes of Shakespeare, you every now and then encounter Strains that recognize the divine Composer. This Difference may be thus accounted for. Jonson, as we said before, owing all his Excellence to his Art, by which he sometimes strain'd himself to an uncommon Pitch, when at other times he unbent and play'd with his Subject, having ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... piano fingered a chord tentatively, then struck into a popular song, an appealing little melody, the words a lyric set to music by a composer with a spark ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... soul, is profound and true. It is soul we want; for the piano, the organ, the violin, the orchestra, are only instruments for the transmission of soul. This is also the reason why the most flawless conductor is not always the best. He must have a soul capable of reading the soul of the composer; and the orchestra must receive the life of the composer as that is interpreted to them through the life of the conductor, or the performance will ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the great composer, once asked him how it happened that his church music was so full of gladness, and Haydn replied, 'I cannot make it otherwise. I write according to the thoughts I feel; when I think upon my God, my heart is so full of joy that the ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... him to be director of her lessons in singing, and also permitted him to write German letters for her; and what assistance worthy of all gratitude he had enjoyed through the director of the imperial musicians, Gombert, the composer and leader of the royal orchestra, and his colleague Appenzelder, who directed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... opportunity offered; once a week, at least, she had a concert at her house, and the music-master from the cathedral, who directed this little band, came frequently to see her. This was a Parisian, named M. le Maitre, a good composer, very lively, gay, young, well made, of little understanding, but, upon the whole, a good sort of man. Madam de Warrens made us acquainted; I attached myself to him, and he seemed not displeased with me. A pension was talked of, and agreed on; ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... As he caught sight of it the young fellow's face brightened gaily. He stepped back a little way, leaned against a linden, and sang, in the drawling tone peculiar to the west of France, the following Breton ditty, published by Bruguiere, a composer to whom we are indebted for many charming melodies. In Brittany, the young villagers sing this song to all newly-married ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... shall I begin?" asked a youth of twelve who had played with great skill on the piano. "Pooh, pooh," replied Mozart, "you must wait." "But you began when you were younger than I am," said the boy. "Yes, so I did," said the great composer, "but I never asked anything about it. When one has the spirit of a composer, he writes because ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... would ever be able to take part in these artistic discussions; she was afraid not. Even when she succeeded in picking up the thread of an idea, it soon got tangled with another, and she began to fear she would never know why Herve was a better composer than Offenbach, and why a certain quintette was written on classical lines and such-like. She asked Montgomery to explain things to her, but he was more anxious to speak of his own music, and when the names of the ladies of the company were ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Meistersingers. He raved about Ternina in Tristan. He had worshipped the Joachim quartet. He was acquainted with all the popular symphonies of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, Glazounov, and Tschaikovsky. He even frequented the Philharmonic Concerts, which were then conducted by a composer of sentimental drawing-room ballads, and though he would not class this conductor with Richter or Henry J. Wood, he yet believed that somehow, by the magic of the sacred name of the Philharmonic Society, the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... those passages of Philo which most closely resemble others in the Wisdom of Solomon, and contain the same or nearly the same thoughts, and write them in opposite columns, and no doubt will remain that Philo was not the composer of the Book of Wisdom. Philo subtle, and with long involved periods knit together by logical connectives: the Book of Wisdom sententious, full of parallelisms, assertory and Hebraistic throughout. It was either composed by a man who ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... mineralogy, precious stones, antiquities, and curiosities; but I had at my command every possible resource for acquiring these studies, as one of my dearest and best friends, Aristide le Carpentier, a learned antiquary, and uncle of the talented composer of the same name, had, and still has, a cabinet of antique curiosities, which makes the keepers of the imperial museums fierce with envy. My son and I spent many long days in learning here names and dates of which we afterwards made a learned ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... and when his career was finished, he reverently said, "It is enough; now take away my life!" The music we had heard before; we had been rapt many a time while hearing the magnificent choruses; but we never had known the dramatic power of the composer as shown in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... born at Macon, Ga., on the third of February, 1842. His earliest known ancestor of the name was Jerome Lanier, a Huguenot refugee, who was attached to the court of Queen Elizabeth, very likely as a musical composer; and whose son, Nicholas, was in high favor with James I. and Charles I., as director of music, painter, and political envoy; and whose grandson, Nicholas, held a similar position in the court of Charles II. A portrait ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... one instrument which they know and understand, and it has been in use among the Norwegians for hundreds of years. Their most famous violin-player, Ole Bull, who died some few years ago, was looked on as a great composer and musician. But all over the country there are to be found men who can play after a fashion; and a century or so ago, when the people were still very superstitious, they fully believed that anyone who could play at all well had had intercourse with the fairies, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... unbearably tedious passage on the piano about a hundred times in succession, while Woloda, who was dozing on a settee in the drawing-room, kept addressing no one in particular as he muttered, "Lord! how she murders it! WHAT a musician! WHAT a Beethoven!" (he always pronounced the composer's name with especial irony). "Wrong again! Now—a second time! That's it!" and so on. Meanwhile Katenka and I were sitting by the tea-table, and somehow she began to talk about her favourite subject—love. I ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... hundred years ago. They heard it from the wild Tartars and Mongols—heard it and rejected it, because it was primitive, untamed, and not to be compared with their own carefully controlled melodies. Mr. Emerson Whithorne, the famous British composer, who is an authority on oriental music, made this statement to the London ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... further. A landscape painter would not make a primary study of Angelo's anatomical drawings; a composer of lyric forms of music would not study Sousa's marches; nor would a person writing a story look for much assistance in the arguments of Burke. The most direct benefit is derived from studying the very thing one wishes to know about, not from studying something ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... A part of Tommy's equipment in which he is supposed to pack up his troubles and smile, according to the words of a popular song (the composer was never ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... Lans, a most superb mountain. The whole scene equal to anything in Switzerland, as far as the mountains go. The Mont de Lans is opposite the windows, seeming little more than a stone's throw off, and causing my companion (whose name I will, with his permission, Italianise into that of the famous composer Giuseppe Verdi) to think it a mere nothing to mount to the top of those sugared pinnacles which he will not believe are many miles distant in reality. After dinner we trudge on, the scenery constantly improving, ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... a beautiful child, whom she rescued from the tender mercies of Wat's moss-troopers, on their return from a foray into Cumberland. The youth grew up under her protection, and is believed to have been the composer both of the words and the music of many of the best old songs of the Border. As ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... to appear in different keys. Many fugues of Bach are written throughout in multiple counterpoint; but the possibility of this, even to composers such as Bach and Mozart, to whom difficulties seem unknown, depends upon the freedom of the musical design which allows the composer to select the most effective permutations and combinations of his counterpoint, and also to put them into whatever key he chooses. An unaccompanied round for unequal voices would bring about the permutations ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... of whom mention has been made, was one of two sisters, both sufficiently noted for their artistic gifts to have found a place in the new Dictionary of National Biography. The elder, Eliza or Lizzie, was a musical composer; the younger, best known as Sarah Flower Adams, a writer of sacred verse. Her songs and hymns, including the well-known 'Nearer, my God, to Thee', were often set to music by her sister.* They sang, I am told, delightfully together, and ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Edmund Lacy (1420-1455), composer of an office in honour of the Archangel Raphael, left a saintly reputation, and pilgrimages were, for long, made to his tomb. According to Canon Freeman he raised the chapter house and glazed ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... ago a young composer was sitting in a garden. All around bloomed beautiful roses, and through the gentle evening air the swallows flitted, twittering cheerily. The young composer neither saw the roses nor heard the evening music of the swallows; his heart was full of sadness and his eyes were ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... week's study, knew better and better that it is resource, and bravery, and being able to think for one's self, that make a physician worth anything. There must be an instinct that recognizes a disease and suggests its remedy, as much as an instinct that finds the right notes and harmonies for a composer of music, or the colors for a true artist's picture, or the results of figures for a mathematician. Men and women may learn these callings from others; may practice all the combinations until they can carry them through with a greater or less degree of unconsciousness of brain and fingers; but ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... "a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a mechanician, an inventor, a musician and a composer of music, a man of literary knowledge and practice, a writer of airy and dainty songs, a clever artist with pencil and brush, and a humorist ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... London; but there I was not the hero of the opera. This minstrel combined the whole affair in a most simple manner. He was Verdi, Costa, and orchestra all in one. He was a thorough Macaulay as historian, therefore I had to pay the composer as well as the fiddler. I compromised the matter, and gave him a few dollars, as I understood that he was Mek Nimmur's private minstrel; but I never parted with my dear Maria Theresa (* The Austrian ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... sound man's youth, the golden, gladsome, romantic age of forty," he looked delightfully fresh, and wide-awake, and cheerful, and perfectly in the scheme of the blue day and the bird-notes and the smiling country. Permit me to introduce Mr. Adrian Willes, by vocation a composer and singer of songs, and—"contrapuntally," as he would explain—Anthony Craford's housemate, monitor, land-agent, and ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... 22nd of January, George Herbert Rodwell, the celebrated composer and writer, was removed from among the living. His musical compositions and stage productions were numerous ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... introduced by Cantapresto had obtained leave to display at court. This lively puppet performed with surprising skill on the harpsichord, giving the company, among other novelties, selections from the maestro Piccini's latest opera and a concerto of the German composer Gluck. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... not yet been produced, one reason being (perhaps) that it has never been offered to anybody. It is difficult enough to find a manager, but when one has also to get hold of a composer, the business of production becomes terrifying. I suppose there is a way of negotiating these difficulties, but I suspect that most of the fun to be got out of this operetta we have ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... represented the only substantial and valuable things in the wide universe; and they sang the songs of Conrad Beissels with as much fervor as they could have sung the songs of heaven itself. Beissels—the Friedsam of the brotherhood—was not only the poet but the composer of the choral songs, and a composer of rare merit. The music he wrote is preserved as it was copied out with great painstaking by the brethren and sisters. In looking over the wonderful old manuscript notebook, the first impression is one of delight with the quaint symbolic illuminations ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... which bore the royal arms, flares were burning up to the topmost cornice of the round walls. A temporary altar decorated in white and gold was ablaze with candles, and the choir, conducted by a fashionable composer of opera, were in a golden cage. The King and Queen and royal princes sat in chairs under a velvet canopy, and there were tribunes for cabinet ministers, senators, deputies, and foreign ambassadors. Religion was necessary to all state ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... harpsichord or clavichord by Haydn or his contemporaries, we are apt to echo the saying ... But let us look the thing straight in the face: Mozart's sonatas are compositions entirely unworthy of the author of 'The Magic Flute' and 'Don Giovanni,' or of any composer with pretensions to more than mediocre talent. They are written in a style of flashy harpsichord virtuosity such as Liszt in his most despised moments never descended to. Yet I am well aware that this statement would be dismissed as either absurd or heretical, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... handmaid of Poetry; and in our modern languages, even, which are so artificial and removed from primitive enthusiasm and naturalness, no composer of opera would consent to adapt his inspirations to a prose libretto. It was far more so in primitive times; and it maybe said that in those days poetry was never composed unless to be sung or played on instruments. But what has never been ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... probably a characteristic defect of a good deal of current criticism of remote writers to attribute to them too much of our modern conceptions and aims. Similarly, we often import our own special feelings into the utterances of the poet and of the musical composer. That much of this intuition is illusory, may be seen by a little attention to the "intuitions" of different critics. Two readers of unlike emotional organization will find incompatible modes of feeling in the same poet. And everybody knows how common it is for musical ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... humour, the performance proved highly successful, although Mrs. Coleman was as good as her word in introducing some original and decidedly "funny" chords into the accompaniment, which would have greatly discomposed the composer, if he had by any ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Gretry, the musical composer, thought so highly of the importance of woman as an educator of character, that he described a good mother as "Nature's CHEF-D'OEUVRE." And he was right: for good mothers, far more than fathers, tend to the perpetual ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... is a subject of surpassing interest to the musician. Whatever may be thought the true purpose of music, there can be no question as to one demand made on each individual instrument,—it must produce tones of sensuous beauty. A composer may delight in dissonances; but no instrument of the orchestra may produce harsh or discordant tones. Of beauty of tone the ear is the sole judge; naturally so, for the only appeal of the individual tone is to the ear. Melody, rhythm, and harmony ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... piece for other people, and I doubt if he finds that promise any easier to break than I do, for he would not care to let others see his emotion. I have often wondered what was in the heart of the composer, for it touches my heart like no other piece of music has power to do. I fear I have not made it very plain to you, dear, but I wish you understood it as ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... sheepishly taken his station beside Miss Tag-rag, the performances commenced with Before Jehovah's awful throne! But mercy upon us! at what a rate she rattled over that "pious air!" If its respectable composer (whoever he may be) had been present, he must have gone into a fit; but there was no help for it—the heart of the lovely performer was in The Battle of Prague, to which she presently did most ample justice. So much were her feelings engaged in that sublime ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... giving birth to a great idea: filled with the divine afflatus, even to the bursting of their buttonholes and the snapping of their braces. His Handel is in a state of exceeding perturbation: his clothes in staring disorder, his hair floating in the breeze. The intention was to represent the composer in the act of raptured meditation upon music; but, as Allan Cunningham remarks, he looks much more like a man alarmed at an apparition. But then this exaggeration of demeanour was very much the artist's own manner in actual life. The Frenchman has always a sort of innate histrionic ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... of the composer grew in power and beauty he forgot himself and his dilemma in his enjoyment. Two senses were finding abundant gratification at the same time, for it was a delight to listen, and it was even a greater pleasure to look ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... this race of vagabonds and outcasts had ever risen much above their traditional occupation of tinkering, far less that any portion of it had displayed original artistic genius. We have, however, from Robert Franz the composer a most interesting account of the wonderful music of the Hungarian gypsies or Tziganys, which he had several opportunities of hearing during a visit to a friend in Hungary. He had been much impressed in his youth by the wandering apparitions of these people in the streets ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... commendation of Paesiello was changed to the most stinging censure. It was on the occasion of the first representation of Paesiello's Zingari in Fiera. The first consul and his wife were in their loge, and to show to the public how much he honored and esteemed the composer, he had invited Paesiello to attend ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... what Euphra was incapable of! No doubt she sang it quite correctly; but there was no religion in it. Not a single tone worshipped or rejoiced. The quality of sound necessary to express the feeling and thought of the composer was lacking: the palace of sound was all right constructed, but of wrong material. Euphra, however, was quite unconscious of failure. She did not care for the music; but she attributed her lack of interest in it to the ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... friend of Scriabin, telegraphed the news of the composer's death to a friend in England. He stated that Scriabin died of the disease of the lip from which he was suffering when in England last year, and that he had just finished the "wonderful poetical text" of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Tombs. Yet how different, how feverish, how tragic! Like all great men working in the grip of a unifying idea, Rodin modified the old technique of sculpture so that it would serve him as plastically as does sound a musical composer. A deep lover of music, his inner ear may dictate the vibrating rhythms of his forms—his marbles are ever musical; not "frozen music" as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but silent swooning music. This gate is a Frieze of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the honours of the enchanted island to his wife. Dressed as a sailor, he conducted her, disguised as Flora, in an ornamented barge, all festooned with garlands, and illuminated with coloured lamps. It was a truly fairy scene, and the Dame Lebrun did not at that time look on the composer of the spectacle as a malignant cobold, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... early life to His Grace the late Duke of Norfolk and Lady Mary Duncan. By them I was placed for education in the Irish Convent, Rue du Bacq, Faubourg St. Germain, at Paris, where the immortal Sacchini, the instructor of the Queen, gave me lessons in music. Pleased with my progress, the celebrated composer, when one day teaching Marie Antoinette, so highly overrated to that illustrious lady my infant natural talents and acquired science in his art, in the presence of her very shadow, the Princesse de Lamballe, as to excite in Her Majesty ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... quiet. From afar comes the sound of heavy guns, as if huge dogs were baying underground. Some young wounded officers are enjoying the peace of the evening. Three of them are talking gaily with two ladies. The fourth, a Landsturm lieutenant, in civil life a well-known composer, sits gloomily apart. He has had a severe nervous shock, and is utterly prostrated, so that not even the arrival of his fair young wife enables him to pull himself together. When she speaks to him, he is unmoved. When she tries to touch him, he draws irritably away. She suffers, ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... The composer of an American ragtime song is to have a statue erected to him in New York. It is hoped that this warning will have the desired effect on any composers in this country who may be tempted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... permission I may venture to play you a few extracts from my repertoire. I can play to suit all tastes from a simple country ballad to a concerto by Brahms or the great Russian composer Tschaikouski. ...
— The Turn of the Road - A Play in Two Scenes and an Epilogue • Rutherford Mayne
... intolerable tyranny; and when Clement the Ninth exempted them from it, he did not abolish the races of Christian boys and old men. The people detested the Jews, hooted them, hissed them, and maltreated them with and without provocation. Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the composer, wrote to a friend from Berlin late in the eighteenth century, complaining bitterly that in that self-styled city of toleration, the cry of 'Jew' was raised against him when he ventured into the streets with his little children by daylight, and that the boys threw stones at them, as they passed, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... which I purchased at Bland's music-shop in Holborn in the year 1794, intitled, 'Think not, my love' and professing to be set to music by Thomas Wright. (I conjecture, Organist of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and composer of the pretty Opera called Rusticity.) ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... calm and power of anything but the little, almost girlish woman he glimpsed through half-closed lids across the ebony board of the enormous piano, which she commanded, as she commanded herself, as she commanded the composer. Her touch was definite, authoritative, was his judgment, as the Prelude faded away in dying chords hauntingly reminiscent of its full vigor that seemed still to linger ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... accuracy of his memory, and 'tis only when he states his facts that you admire the flights of his imagination." But the thought was too good to be thus wasted on the desert air of a common-place book. So, forth it came, at the expense of Kelly, who, having been a composer of music, became a wine-merchant. "You will," said the ready wit, "import your music and compose your wine." Nor was this service exacted from the old idea thought sufficient; so, in the House of Commons, an easy and, apparently, off-hand ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... mentioned having a letter from a friend in Boston who had lately heard a great chorus rendered. He could not be quite sure of the name of the composer because he had read the letter hurriedly and his friend was a blind-writer, but that made no difference to Harry. He could fill in facts enough about the grandeur of the music from his own imagination to make ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... and "From Puritan Days" can be played between the episodes and the Dance Interlude. An orchestra or piano can add to the music of Faunch's fiddle in the Merrymount scene. The music for the procession should be very stately, and by a seventeenth-century composer, if possible. ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... been his share in the takings of the theatre—a share which would doubtless increase as the earlier partners disappeared. He must have speedily become the principal man in the firm, combining as he did the work of composer, reviser, and adaptor of plays with that of actor and working partner. We are thus dealing with a temperament or mentality not at all obviously original or masterly, not at all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness, not at all obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th century, that as an "adorateur diligent du Tres-Haut, ministre du Christ, il sut garder la chastete et se preserver du contact de l'amour sensuel." But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... too, when the maker of ballets was locked in his domain and his servant had strict orders to admit no one—neither Monsieur le Cure nor the mayor, nor so intimate a comrade as myself—during such hours as these the little boy was generally beside the composer, his chubby toes scarcely reaching to the rungs of the chair beside Tanrade's ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... a public teacher, and at thirty began the study of music, making such remarkable progress in this art that from the study of one piece he was able to describe the person of the composer, even to his features and the expression of his eyes. His teacher now gave him up. The pupil had passed infinitely beyond his reach. At the next important epoch in the life of Confucius (499 B.C.) he had become one of the chief ministers ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... sunshine; that pretty violin—one can easily understand that he was fond of it himself—ought to have been taken away from him, and a kite-string placed in his hand instead. If God had set the germ of a great musician or a great composer in that slight body, surely it would have been wise to let the precious gift ripen and flower in its ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... far and wide throughout the musical centres of Germany as a learned and recondite composer, as a brilliant improviser, and as an organist beyond rivalry. Yet it was in these last two capacities that his reputation among his contemporaries was the most marked. It was left to a succeeding generation to fully enlighten ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... wording we gather that the general and uncontrollable desire to hear the Second and Third Acts of DE LA-RA-Boom's Opera did not extend to its Prologue, First Act, Fourth Act (if any), and Epilogue. But is it complimentary to a Composer to express a general wish to hear only certain portions of his work, implying thereby that the generally un-expressed desire is rather against than for re-hearing the other portions? All the same Sir COVENT ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... essence of every drama. This continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose! Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the situation was summed up in Wagner's famous phrase, "The means of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
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