"Chopin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... branch of activity he may adorn. If he is an archbishop, it is interesting to know what he looks like when he has exchanged his leggings for a human dress; if he is a pork millionaire, we like to see whether he enjoys Chopin; if he is a great writer, the interest of his home life is intensified. For the tens of thousands who know an author by his books, the number who know him at home may quite well ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Galtonian lines would tend to eliminate many of the great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but actually and pathologically abnormal—men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Poe, Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,—and how many others? But such considerations should not lead us into error of concluding that such men were geniuses merely because they were pathological specimens, and that the only way to produce a genius is to breed disease and defect. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... bears the name of "Geo. Astor & Co., Cornhill, London;" while still another in my immediate neighborhood in Washington has the inscription of "Astor and Camp, 79 Cornhill, London." Their octaves were few in number, and a pupil of Chopin would have regarded them with scorn; but upon these little spindle-legged affairs a duet could be performed. My first knowledge of instrumental music was derived from one of these pianos, and among the earliest recollections of my childhood is that of hearing my three ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... far-off blue mountains, while little birds sing their love-songs, and golden-haired children weave garlands of wild roses; or when in the solemn twilight we listen to wondrous harmonies of Beethoven and Chopin that stir the heart like voices from an unseen world; at such times one feels that the profoundest answer which science can give to our questionings is but a superficial answer after all. At these moments, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... I will go with your brother, first, to see if Madame Chopin has other lodgers. If so, I will go to the wife of one of my clerks, who also lets a portion of a house; or, if you would not mind poor accommodation, to another of the captains' wives as, in your brother's character of a sailor, it would be ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... replied, "Pardon my hasty remark—you speak but truth." And then he played Chopin's "Funeral March," a dirge not only to the great men of Poland gone, but to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... but also the way of writing it, authors give to performers all necessary indications, and they have only to carefully observe them. There are, however, some interesting remarks applicable to the music of Chopin which recent editions unfortunately are commencing to falsify. Chopin detested the abuse of the pedal. He could not bear that through an ignorant employment of the pedal two different chords should be mixed in tone together. Therefore, he has given indications with the ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... In comparatively recent times the term has been widened to include music in which there is one chief melody to which other portions of the musical texture are subordinate; e.g., the homophonic style of Chopin in whose works the chief melody, often in the upper voice, seems to float ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... line the piano cannot have been more than ten feet from the reader's chair; and the strain of reading aloud for an hour against a powerful rendering of the most vigorous compositions of Liszt, Wagner, Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin was a most trying ordeal for voice, brain and nerves. Mr. Pulitzer could apparently enjoy the music and the reading at the same time. Often, when something was played of which he knew the air, he would follow the notes ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... ought you to treat her? Unless you are an ingrate infinite you will treat her well. You will treat her better than any one in the universe except your God. Her name will have in it more music than in all that Chopin, or Bach, or Rheinberger composed. Her eyes, swollen with three weeks of night watching over a child with scarlet fever, will be to you beautiful as a May morning. After the last rose petal has dropped out of her cheek, after the last feather of the raven's wing has fallen from her ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... Poland. Like Goethe or Stendhal, Conrad can write in the midst of war's alarums about the hair's-breadth 'scapes of his characters. But, then, the Polish is the most remarkable race in Europe; from leading forlorn hopes to playing Chopin the Poles are unequalled. Mr. Conrad has returned to his old habitat in fiction. An ingenious map shows the reader precisely where his tragic tale is enacted. It may not be his most artistic, but it is an engrossing story. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... snide Bungalow, and it was now a Queen Anne Chateau dripping with Dew-dads of Scroll Work and congested with Black Walnut. The Goddess took her Mocha in the Feathers, and a Music Teacher came twice each week to bridge the awful chasm between Dorothy and Chopin. Dinner had been moved up to Milking Time. Sweetbreads and Artichokes came into the Lives of the Trio ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... spirit;—that rare mingling of ruggedness and simplicity, of purity and passionate power, which went to make up the remarkable character of the man, and which sets Beethoven's music apart from the music of his compeers. Wagner, Chopin, Grieg,—these range the whole gamut of emotion for its own sake. But in the hands of the master it becomes what it should be—the great uplifting ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... of the man were vain—he had elements in his character that made him akin to Keats, Shelley, Burns, Byron, Chopin and Stephen Crane. With these his name will in brotherhood be forever linked. He was one made to suffer, sin and die—a few short summers, and autumn came with yellow leaves and he was gone. And the principal legacy he left us is the thought of wonder as to what he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... of singing speech, but his poetry lacks intellectual content. In the volume Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), there is a dreamy charm, like the hesitating notes of Chopin. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... and pleasures of the summer Jacques kept as near as he could to Serena. If he learned a new tune, by listening to the piano—some simple, artful air of Mozart, some melancholy echo of a nocturne of Chopin, some tender, passionate love-song of Schubert—it was to her that he would play it first. If he could persuade her to a boat-ride with him on the lake, Sunday evening, the week was complete. He even learned to know the more shy and delicate forest-blossoms that she preferred, ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... much time with the children as she could, and until Sir Isaac locked up the piano she played, and was surprised to find far more in Chopin than she had ever suspected in the days when she had acquired a passable dexterity of execution. She found, indeed, the most curious things in Chopin, emotional phrases, that stirred and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... like this!" cried Bixiou, ruffling his locks till they stood on end. Gifted with the same talent for mimicking absurdities which Chopin the pianist possesses to so high a degree, he proceeded forthwith to represent ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... father was a French officer who had served in the army of the emigrant princes, and her mother was the daughter of a Frankfort banker. She was married in 1827 to the comte Charles d'Agoult. In Paris she gathered round her a brilliant society which included Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Ingres, Chopin, Meyerbeer, Heine and others. She was separated from her husband, and became the mistress of Franz Liszt. During her frequent travels in Switzerland, France and Italy she made the acquaintance of George Sand, and figures in the Lettres d'un ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the piano and began mechanically to play scales, but the somnolent monotony of the tones only added to her nervousness. Later she played some of Chopin's Nocturnes, lingered over those mysterious tones that seemed like strains from another world, full of tears, pain, cries of anguish, and bleak despair; the radiance of cold moonlight nights, moans like the whisper of ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... great performer, but what she could play she played by heart, and Nature had provided her with a sweet, thrush-like voice, with that true musical thrill which no teaching can impart. At the first few bars of a Chopin nocturne Mr Macalister's newspaper wavered, and fell to his knee. Margot heard the rustle of it, slid gradually into a simpler melody, and was conscious of a heavy hand ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... disappointing! Would you believe it, I am always so unfortunate! May I most respectfully ask you to present my compliments to Alexandra Michailovna, and remind her... tell her, that with my whole heart I wish for her what she wished for herself on Thursday evening, while she was listening to Chopin's Ballade. She will remember. I wish it with all sincerity. General Ivolgin and ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... vases on the piano—her piano!—the spirit of desire which had so long possessed him, waking and sleeping, returned,—returned to torture him now with greater skill amidst these her possessions; her volume of Chopin on the rack, bound in red leather and stamped with her initials, which compelled his glance as he passed, and brought vivid to his memory the night he had stood in the snow and heard her playing. So, he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Mischa Elman, Harry Lauder, Sousa, Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms, Grieg, Moszkowsky, the "latest song hit" from anything you please. Ask and you will find along this thoroughfare. There are no more prosperous looking bazaars on this street than those consecrated to the sale of "musical phonographs" ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... the window, as Mrs. F.'s AUNT might suggest,—but to be thanked and wondered at as an inchoate OFFENBACH, who might, under other circumstances, have written an American opera-bouffe, or, better still, as a possible CHOPIN, who might have written a second "March Funebre" as hopeless and desolate and fascinating as that of the despairing and poetic Pole. (I am coming to "FRITZ" in a moment, but I won't be hurried by ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... younger hysterical Niobe. There were perfume-bottles enough to start a coiffeur in business, and woolly lambs enough for a dozen pastoral poems or as many bucolic butchers. But the piano was piled high with Beethoven's sonatas and Chopin's delicious dream-music, while a deluge of French novels had evidently surged over that palace of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... profondo, or a brass-bandsman, were always treated with the greatest indulgence by the ladies, and my high soprano flourished and positively reached unknown altitudes under the beneficent sunshine of their applause. (For all that I never attempted Chopin's "Impromptu.") ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... select few, who hold communion in the love of classical quartet and trio music by the great masters,—in the piano poems of Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven, there will be abundant opportunities. The Mendelssohn Quintette Club, the German Trio, Mr. Satter, the pianist, and would we might add Otto Dresel, will give series of concerts in the pleasant Chickering Saloon, that holds two hundred. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... looked at me keenly, and when his scrutiny was completed he fell to whistling a bar of Chopin's Marche Funebre. Then he turned ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... sonnets they draw, to their own hurt it may be, the secret of his love and make it their own; they look with new eyes on modern life, because they have listened to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or handled Greek things, or read the story of the passion of some dead man for some dead woman whose hair was like threads of fine gold, and whose mouth was as a pomegranate. But the sympathy of the artistic temperament is necessarily with what has found expression. In words ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... music. And long before we reached the hotel she who had played—I cannot say for certain what she played that day in the Luxembourg Gardens; my love of music was not then fully awakened; could it have been?—the names of Bach and Chopin come up in my mind—"I can't speak about music," she said, as we turned into the Rue du Bac, and she ran up the stairs of the hotel possessed completely by the other Mildred. She asked her mother to play the "Brooklyn Cake Walk," and she danced "the lovely two-step," ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... it's wonderful—simply wonderful!" she sighed blissfully when the last liquid ripples of a Chopin waltz had died away. "I don't see how you ever learned to play like that! But what in the world are you going to do now?" For Phyllis had jumped up with an impatient exclamation, laid back the cover of the grand piano, and was hunting frantically in ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... evenings were spent by the mother in reading and writing, while the daughter gave herself up to the indulgence of her one great passion, music. Scales and exercises, Schubert and Chopin, and invariably at the end—before retiring for the night—Beethoven, the Master, the ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... have had a taste of my sensations. A first victim is being chosen. I have a vision of the spirits of composers small and great—standing up like suspects awaiting identification, while her eye ranges over them. Chopin tries to edge behind Wagner, a difficult and forbidding person, and Gounod seeks eclipse of Mendelssohn, who suddenly drops and crawls on all fours between Gounod's legs; Sullivan cowers, and even Piccolomini's ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... very much better than you did a month after your illness, Mrs. Fullerton," said Joseph Fleming, who was to take a hand, while Hadria played Grieg or Chopin, or Scottish melodies to please the old people. The whist-players enjoyed ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Miss Leigh presided at the piano and appeared to have complete command of the instrument; she could read anything at sight, no matter how it bristled with sharps and accidentals; her repertoire ranged from Beethoven, Bach, Grieg, Chopin, to the latest ragtime, and her playing had a crisp ringing touch that ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... Antwerp Cathedral. They waver and float through those vast halls until the ear catches only a faint echo from some far, dim aisle. "How many centuries elapsed before this subterranean organ gave forth its delightful tones!" It lacked only the soul of a Beethoven or Chopin to interpret them aright. How like many noble lives whose talents perhaps shall only bud "unseen" or waste upon the desert air of environment. One thinks of Keats, whose wonderful Ode to the Nightingale and lovely Nature Poems might never have been sung had he not gone ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Paris more than ever convinced that he was not fitted to live in Europe. Yet, mon ami, he ran away from here, and went to the savage Marquesas Islands, where he died in a few years. He loved the third etude of Chopin, and the andante of Beethoven's twenty-third sonata. You know music says things we would be almost afraid to put in words, if we could. If Flaubert might have written 'Madame Bovary' or 'Salambo' in musical notes, he would not have been prosecuted by ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... possessed him to see how she would carry herself now. He caught up the book he had come for, and went downstairs to the piazza. Sylvia had vanished. Disappointed, he went back into the house. Straying to the piano, he sat down and began to play a Chopin prelude. It was John's one and only instrumental achievement, learned by ear, and dug out of the ivories, as one might say, by long hours of laborious search ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... critics and a certain public have welcomed them; but is it not "sham antique"? It does not remind one of the really classic. Moreover, the naked foot should be of antique beauty, which in most of these cases it is not. Advertisements tell us that these dance are interpretations of classic music—Chopin, Weber, Brahms, etc.; they are not really interpretations, but distractions! We can hardly imagine that these composers intended their work for actual dancing. One can listen and be entranced; one sees the dancer's "interpretations" or "translations" and ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... and all the musicians, famous or otherwise, that passed through Antwerp made his rooms a favorite resort and house of call. And Barty was introduced into a world as delightful to him as it was new—and to music that ravished his soul with a novel enchantment: Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Schumann—and he found that Schubert had written a few other ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... few are known to fame beyond the frontiers of Italy. The younger men follow religiously in the steps of Mascagni or Puccini, while their elders still hang on to the skirts of 'Aida.' Giacomo Orefice won a success of curiosity in 1901 with his 'Chopin,' a strange work dealing in fanciful fashion with the story of the Polish composer's life, the melodies of the opera being ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... of the eighteenth century John Field of Dublin was a distinguished pianist. He subsequently (1814) invented the nocturne, developed by Chopin. Sir John Stevenson (the arranger of the Irish Melodies), Tom Cooke, William Southwell (inventor of the damper action for pianofortes), Henry Mountain, Andrew Ashe (flautist), Barton, Rooke, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... pomegranate, glowing with orange, silvered with lemon blossoms, came the tinkling music of contadini bells, the bleating of kids, the twittering of happy birds, the distant chime of an Angelus; all the subtle harmony, the fragmentary melody that flickers through an Impromptu of Chopin or Schubert. She saw the simulacrum of her former self, the proud, happy Beryl of old, singing from the score of the "Messiah", in the organ loft of a marble church; she heard the rich tenor voice of her handsome brother, as he trilled a barcarole one night, crossing the Atlantic; she smelled ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... little further along, on the opposite side of the way. By the light of the street lamp under which it stopped we could see that it held a piano and two persons beside the driver. The man was masked, and wore a soft felt hat and a velvet coat. He seated himself at the piano and played a Chopin waltz with decided sentiment and brilliancy; then, touching the keys idly for a moment or two, he struck a few chords of prelude and turned towards the woman who sat beside him. She rose, and, laying one hand on the ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... conventional speeches had so charmed and captivated the lady on his right, would, when once in this room, sit astride some chair, a pipe in one hand, a mug of beer in the other. Here he would discuss with Simmons or Jack or Oliver his preference of Chopin over Beethoven, or the difference between Parepa-Rosa and Jenny Lind, or any topic which had risen out of the common talk, and all too with a grotesqueness of speech and manner that would have frozen his hostess of the dinner-table dumb with astonishment ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... wind wandering, forever grieves Low overhead, Above grey mosses whispering of leaves Fallen and dead. And through the lonely night sweeps their refrain Like Chopin's prelude, sobbing 'neath ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... great artist. As an interpreter of Chopin she had no rival among women, and only one man was her equal. She had fire, tenderness, passion, strength; she had beyond all these, soul, which is worth more in true expression than the most marvelous technique. She had chosen Chopin for his ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... CHOPIN, a musical composer, born near Warsaw, of Polish origin; his genius for music early developed itself; distinguished himself as a pianist first at Vienna and then in Paris, where he introduced the mazurkas; became the idol of the salons; visited England twice, in 1837 and 1848, and performed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... charming as her father," replied Lady Laura, with whom that favourite adjective served for everything in the way of praise. To her the Pyramids and Niagara, a tropical thunderstorm, a mazourka by Chopin, and a Parisian bonnet, were all alike charming. "I suppose solidity isn't so nice in a girl," she went on, laughing; "but certainly Sophia Granger is not such a favourite with me as her father is. I suppose she will make a brilliant marriage, however, sooner ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... significant that the rhythmic pulses | | which come most naturally to us are in twos and threes and | | their multiples; while even to beat time in fives requires a | | special effort. In music 5/8 or 5/4 time is extremely rare. | | There is an example of the latter in Chopin's Sonata I (the | ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... happened that a famous musician, who settled in Cambridge for a time, came across her gift and took notice of it. And to please him she worked with industry, even with doggedness. Brahms, Chopin, Wagner—these great romantics possessed her in music as Shelley or Rossetti did in poetry. "You little demon, Laura! How do you come to play like that?" a girl friend—her only intimate friend—said to her once in despair. "It's the expression. Where do you get ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of age she cannot paint the baptism of John upon velvet, does not know a word of that accursed French language, breaks down in the "forward and back" of a cotillon, and cannot with spider fingers spin upon the piano the swiftest Tarantelle of Chopin.— 2558 Metronome? We will find something better and braver than all that, my little Alice! Confound your Italianos!—the birds shall be the music-masters of my tiny dame. Moonrise, and sunset, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... round-shouldered man with long gray hair that hung over his collar and queer eyes that seemed to look through and through one. But after she had heard him play she lost her shyness, for in his music she heard the voices she loved. He called her "little one," and told her long stories of Liszt and Chopin and the other masters. "They are the people that ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... again the language of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and are worthy interpreters of their great thoughts. The poetry and novels of the century are theirs, and they have touched the keynote of reform in religion, politics and social life. They fill the editor's and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... times, too thin to attract the sympathy or to excite the interest of pianists of the present day, who enjoy the richer inheritance of Beethoven, the romantic tone-pictures of Schumann and Brahms, the fascinating miniatures of Chopin, and the clever glitter of Liszt. Still it does not deserve utter oblivion. Hear what Fr. Rochlitz says of it in the Allg. Mus. Zeit.: "It (the sonata) is indeed a tragic scene, one so clearly thought out ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... 23, 1777, to his father. [We have here a suggestion of the tempo rubato as played by Chopin according to the testimony of Mikuli, who said that no matter how free Chopin was either in melody or arabesque with his right hand, the left always adhered strictly to the time. Mozart learned the principle from his father who in his method for the violin condemned the ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... is a most cultivated judge of music. He greatly admires the masters of the eighteenth century, Domenico Scarlatti being his special favourite. But his most ardent devotion is reserved for Sebastian Bach. He does not care much for Chopin, and Beethoven affects him too profoundly and ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... I say something nitwitted about music? Now, indeed, I pour ashes on my head. Lucky you, who need only sit down and spill out your soul in something thoughtfully arranged for that very purpose by Mr. Chopin or Mr. Tschaikovsky! While I—"out of senseless nothing to evoke"—I wish I did something definite and tangible like plain sewing! If I don't start soon I'll sell this think-mobile for junk and put out a sign—"Mending ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... once famous for his studies of Louisiana life in Old Creole Days, and his pictures of this life have given him a permanent place in American literature. His stories should be read in connection with those of Kate Chopin and ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... crisis in George Sand's life was that which centers around her relations with Frederic Chopin. Chopin was the greatest genius who ever loved her. It is rather odd that he loved her. She had known him for two years, and had not seriously thought of him, though there is a story that when she first met him she kissed him before he had even been presented to her. She waited ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... her smile in the moonlight reminded him of a rippling passage of Chopin. Prosaic enough, however, was what she went on to tell him of her struggle for life by day and for learning by night. 'Of course, I could only attend the night medical school. I lived by lining cloaks with fur; my bed was the corner of a room inhabited ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... that evening which she said was worthy to be played with it. It had some chords in it that I remembered long afterward. Years afterward I heard it played the same way in the twilight by one who is a blessed saint in heaven, and may be playing it there now. It was from Chopin. She even said that evening, under the impulse of her enthusiasm, that she did not see, except that it might be abused, why the crucifix should not be retained by all Christian churches, as it enabled ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... sonata is to me anathema as a rule, there are none of MacDowell's works that I like better than his writings in this form. They are to me far the best since Beethoven, not excepting even Chopin's (pace his greatest prophet, Huneker). They seem to me to be of such stuff as Beethoven would have woven had he known in fact the modern piano he ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... sat down at the piano, as was a not infrequent custom of hers before going to bed, not so much because of her enthusiasm for music, but because she did not want to retire to rest too early. On such occasions she played, for the most part, the few pieces which she still knew by heart—mazurkas by Chopin, some passages from one of Beethoven's sonatas, or the Kreisleriana. Sometimes she improvised as well, but never pursued the theme beyond a succession of chords, which, indeed, were always ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... played. She played the Chopin Grande Polonaise, or as much of it as her fingers, tempestuous and inexpert, could clutch and reach. She played, neither with her hands nor with her brain, but with her temperament, febrile and frustrate, seeking its ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... artistic celebrities, whose general rendezvous just then was Paris. A very Pantheon must have been an intimate circle that included, among others, George Sand, Daniel Stern, Heine, the Polish poet Mickiewicz, Eugene Delacroix, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Hiller, and Frederic Chopin. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... alone last Sunday. The whole village was full of closed blinds: and of all things over him Chopin's Funeral March was played!—a thing utterly unchristian in its meaning: wild pagan grief, desolate over lost beauty. "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!" it cried: and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not Balder at all. Too many thorns ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... duty is to behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them. They are the mere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach. And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorak? ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... executant's certainty and grace of movement. It may be the fancy of an outer Philistine, but I love to forget the existence of the instrument and to feel the music coming from the human finger-tips. She found a volume of Chopin's Nocturnes on the rest. In fact she had left it there a fortnight before, the last time she had played for me. I am very fond of Chopin. I am an uneducated fellow and the lyrical mostly appeals to me both in poetry and in music. Besides, I have understood him better since I have ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... which the ground-floor windows stood open, there sounded the notes of a piano—chords touched by a skilful hand. I checked my step, hoping, and in a minute or two the musician began to play that nocturne of Chopin which I love best—I don't know how to name it. My heart leapt. There I stood in the thickening dusk, the glorious sounds floating about me; and I trembled with very ecstasy of enjoyment. When silence came, I waited ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... years past. It begins with Mendelssohn's Spring Song, pianissimo. Then comes Rubinstein's Melody in F, with a touch of forte toward the close, and then Nevin's "Oh, That We Two Were Maying" and then the Chopin waltz in A flat, Opus 69, No. 1, and then the Spring Song again, and then a free fantasia upon "The Rosary" and then a Moszkowski mazurka, and then the Dvorak Humoresque (with its heart-rending cry in the middle), and then ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... inspiration, quickened by the pain with which he was quivering and the consequent irritation that followed came upon the kindly German, and, after his wont, he was caught up and borne above the world. On one sublime theme after another he executed variations, putting into them sometimes Chopin's sorrow, Chopin's Raphael-like perfection; sometimes the stormy Dante's grandeur of Liszt—the two musicians who most nearly approach Paganini's temperament. When execution reaches this supreme degree, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Twain, in his last days, insisted that he wrote more easily in his night-shirt. Richard Wagner deliberately put on certain rich materials in colours and hung his room with them when composing the music of The Ring. Chopin says in a letter to a friend: "After working at the piano all day, I find that nothing rests me so much as to get into the evening dress which I wear on formal occasions." In monarchies based on militarism, royal princes, as soon as they can walk, are put into military uniforms. It cultivates ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... drawing-room ecstasy, to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us—surely an immortal sorrow whose recital will never, never pall—the sorrow of Chopin. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... I knew what it meant. I see now well enough that my fingers were rather stiffer than I realized, and that my 'Twinkling Sprays' and 'Fluttering Zephyrs' were not quite up to date. They wanted Grieg and Lassen and Chopin. 'Very well,' said I, 'just wait.' Now, I never knuckle under. I never give up. So I sent right out for a teacher. I practised scales an hour a day for weeks and months. Granger thought I was going crazy. I tackled Grieg and Lassen and Chopin—yes, and Tschaikowsky, ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... of men With poets' faces heartsome, dear and pale — Sweet visages of all the souls of time Whose loving service to the world has been In the artist's way expressed and bodied. Oh, In arms' reach, here be Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, And Buddha (sweetest masters! Let me lay These arms this once, this humble once, about Your reverend necks — the most containing clasp, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... oppressed. Yes, and for the poets, the painters—the singers and the musicians, with their temperaments of genius, their loves, jealousies, and their shattered nerves. For upwards of six years she treated Chopin with a mother's care; she had the passion of maternity in her towards them all, with whatever feelings it may have been complicated in her life of manifold experiences and with her artist temperament. She may have leant heavily on it at times, ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... sabre stood a piano open, and with a piece of music on the stand—a movement by Chopin; a violoncello leaned in its case in one corner, a cornet-a-piston showed itself, like an arrangement in brass macaroni packed in red velvet upon a side-table; and in front of it lay open a small, flat flute-case, wherein were the two halves of a silver-keyed instrument ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... fingers were stiff and my touch was wooden—so it was small wonder my poor lord and master tried to bury himself in his four-day-old newspaper. Then I tried Schubert's Rosamonde, though that wasn't much of a success. So I wandered on through Liszt to Chopin. And even Chopin struck me as too soft and sugary and far-away for a homesteader's wife, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... exquisite genius. He played to me, and I liked his talking scarcely less. Madame S. loved Liszt before him; she has thus been intimate with the two opposite sides of the musical world. Mickiewicz says, "Chopin talks with spirit, and gives us the Ariel view of the universe. Liszt is the eloquent tribune to the world of men, a little vulgar and showy certainly, but I like the tribune best." It is said here, that Madame S. has long had only a friendship for Chopin, who, perhaps, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... that science, with all its investigations and accurately reasoned conclusions, cannot show the individuals of the present day how to make better paintings than Raphael or Titian? Or better statues than Michael Angelo? Or better music than Chopin or Wagner? Or better literature than Moliere ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... had come to a timely end, if that which is without tempo may be said to have any relation with time, and the trio of Chopin's "Funeral March" was already in uneven progress. The legless man sat on the bare pavement, his back against the handsome area railing of No. 1 Fifth Avenue, and steadily revolved the mechanism of the organ with ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... What did she know by heart? The Largo in the Chopin Sonata. That would do to come ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... John Field. His first composition appeared in his twelfth year, and soon his songs and two and four hand piano-pieces began to attract the attention of musicians. In 1840 Villoing took him to Paris and placed him in the Conservatory, where he attracted the attention of Liszt, Chopin, and Thalberg. He remained in that city eighteen months, devoting himself to unremitting study, and then made some professional tours, in which he met with extraordinary success, particularly in England. From that country he went to Holland and Sweden, everywhere ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... Paris Opera House. The success of this masterpiece so disheartened Rossini that he resolved to write no more operas, and withdrew to Bologna. Charles Francois Gounod, on the other hand, now began his musical career by entering the Paris Conservatory. Frederick Chopin, the Polish composer, at this time was at the height of his vogue as the most recherche pianist of Paris. He was the favorite of a circle of friends consisting of Meyerbeer, Bellini, Berlioz, Liszt, Balzac, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... in elegant French originally, and relate to the social position of artists and the state of the art of music in certain cities or even an entire country. A part of his works is devoted to the music of gypsies, and to a true and honest history of the life of his friend Chopin. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... But I mean other music, the hard things that papa likes. There is one of the Chopin nocturnes that Mrs. Duncan plays, oh, it is so beautiful! I wish you and ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... this literature in the works of a few great masters who have set the pace and established the limits for all the rest. In the line of purely instrumental music this has been done by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. The latter, who exercised a vast influence upon the manner of developing a musical thought and in the selection of the orchestral colors in which it can be expressed advantageously, powerfully stimulated all composers later than himself, nevertheless exerted ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... confide just then. He played, with a queer lingering touch which had something of hesitation in it, and which reduced all music to a succession of soft chords, The Maid of Dundee and Annie Laurie, The Banks of Banna and The Last Rose of Summer, then one of the simpler nocturnes of Chopin, and, following these, a quaint, slow melody which was like all of the others and yet ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... of his uncle's fiddle, but of the music he desired, the tremendous and difficult music that, on a hot July afternoon, taxed the delicate player's strength to its utmost. Lucia began with Scarlatti and Bach; wandered off through Schumann into Chopin, a moonlit enchanted wilderness of sound; paused, and wound up superbly with Beethoven, the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... tail-feathers, or humming-bird's throat. Over such spots one sits in his boat spell-bound, color-entranced, and the ears of his soul listen to color music as thrilling, as enchanting as melodies by Foster and Balfe, minuets by Mozart and Haydn, arias by Handel, nocturnes and serenades by Chopin and Schumann, overtures by Rossini, massive choruses and chorals by Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn, fugues by ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... of some length having Chopin for its subject was Liszt's "Frederic Chopin," which, after appearing in 1851 in the Paris journal "La France musicale," came out in book-form, still in French, in 1852 (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel.—Translated into English by M. W. Cook, and published ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... as well as great, harmonies of nature, paused for a moment to listen to the luscious piping of the feathered minstrel, that in its own wild woodland way had as excellent an idea of musical variation as any Mozart or Chopin. Leaning against one of the park benches, with his back turned to the main thoroughfare, he did not observe the approach of a man's tall, stately figure, that, with something of his own light, easy, swinging step, had followed him rapidly along for some little ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... to the piano. She played really well. Otherwise she would not have played to him, or to any one. She was specially at home in the music of Chopin, and had studied minutely many of the "Etudes." Now she began to play the Etude in E flat. As she played she felt that the intense nervous irritation which had possessed her was diminishing slightly, was becoming more bearable. She played several of the Etudes, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the mind of Everycritic between good music and bad music, in the mind of Everyman between popular music and "classical" music? What is the essential difference between an air by Mozart and an air by Jerome Kern? Why is Chopin's G minor nocturne better music than Thecla Badarzewska's La Priere d'une Vierge? Why is a music drama by Richard Wagner preferable to a music drama by Horatio W. Parker? What makes a melody distinguished? What makes a melody commonplace or cheap? Why do some melodies ring in our ears ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Second Series. Chopin, Dvorak, Brahms. With an Essay on Musical Form. With Four Portraits. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... when Mr. Rodd leaves the problem of the Unconditioned to take care of itself, and makes no attempt to solve the mysteries of the Ego and the non-Ego, he is very pleasant reading indeed. A Mazurka of Chopin is charming, in spite of the awkwardness of the fifth line, and so are the verses on Assisi, and those on San Servolo at Venice. These last have all the brilliancy of a clever pastel. The prettiest thing in the whole volume is ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... publications she found opportunity for expressing many a conviction and for weaving many a fancy; moreover, she was afraid of no one, and never minced matters, therefore they are interspersed with criticisms: she praised Charlotte Bronte, condemned George Sand, ridiculed Chopin, reproved Elizabeth Browning, and satirized "Punch." In her last book there was a great, but scarcely a good change of style, she having been obliged by its thinness to pepper the page with Italics; still these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... close of 1831 that Liszt met Chopin in Paris. From the first, these two men, so different, became fast friends. Chopin's delicate, retiring soul found a singular delight in Liszt's strong and imposing personality. Liszt's exquisite perception enabled him perfectly to live in the strange dreamland of Chopin's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... charming romancer of Germany: and, also, in France, of Theophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset. Among representatives of the other arts—with two of which Browning must ever be closely associated—Mendelssohn and Chopin were born in 1809, and Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner within the four succeeding years: within which space also came Diaz and Meissonier and the great Millet. Other high names there are upon the front of the century. Macaulay, Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... before, the classical stuff may do for those who like it well enough to stand it, but the domestic article suits me. I like the kind of beer that this man Bach turned out in the spring of the year, but I don't seem to be able to care much for his music. And so far as Chopin is concerned, I hope you'll all do ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... at His Majesty's Theatre he interrupted the orchestra in order to request some members of the audience to stop talking. These speakers were people in the stalls, and the composer-conductor could hear that their conversation was about shopping—not Chopin, which, alas! is sometimes pronounced as if the name ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... incidental reference is made to the symphonies of Beethoven, the sonatas of Schubert, the mazurkas of Chopin, and other pianoforte compositions of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... Chopin; and he rose and stood at the fireplace, with his hands folded behind his back. As she turned and looked at him, he said, with ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... pianoforte. Like exquisitely constructed sounding-board. Enriched and spiritualized the pianoforte for all time. Universal rather than individual experiences. National tonality. Zwyny and Elsner. Intimate acquaintance with Bach. Prince Charming of the piano. Liszt on Chopin. Raphael of music. Playing and teaching. Tempo rubato. ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... any tune which had at any time impressed him. He would give Chinese airs, would go through parts of a Greek Church service, would sing words and music of the Dies Irae. On the Sunday following the death of Florence Nightingale our Chertsey organist played Chopin's Funeral March. Sir Charles said its motifs were Greek rustic popular airs, each of which he hummed, showing how Chopin had ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... mind, and spirit. Every day at the hour of opening there is a scurry of feet as the men rush in to the one center in the whole camp where they can congregate. Martin Harvey has just been here to cheer them up, and they were enthusiastic over a fine lecture and recital last night on Chopin. The Colonel in command takes particular pride in the Y M C A for his men, and states that crime among them has been reduced ninety per ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... cantaloupe moon, full of yellow radiance, arose as we listened to the melancholy fall of the water on the muddy flats, and I said to Piloti, "Come, let us go within; there you will play for me some tiny questioning Chopin prelude, and forget this dolorous night." ... He had been staring hard at the moon when I aroused him. "As you will; let us go indoors by all means, for this moon gives me the spleen." Then we ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... single notes of the opening motif of Chopin's Fifteenth Nocturne fell pensively into the waiting room. Miriam, her fatigue forgotten, slid to a featureless freedom. It seemed to her that the light with which the room was filled grew brighter ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... piano. I have heard all the others scores of times, so don't argue with me. You may all worship whom you will, but the whole musical part of my heart is at Madame Carreno's feet, with a small corner saved for Vladimir de Pachmann, when he plays Chopin. She claims to be an American, but she plays with a heart of a Slav, and as one whose untamed spirit can never be held in leash even by her music. Her playing is so intoxicating that it goes through my veins ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... good deal at Versailles, he saw but seldom. In lieu of these, he regularly visited George Sand, who was at present settled in a small flat of the Rue Pigalle in Paris, and was there enjoying the society of Chopin. With a connoisseur's envy, the novelist describes to Eve the interior, the elegantly furnished dining-room in carved oak, the cafe-au-lait upholstered drawing-room, with its superb Chinese vases of fragrant flowers, its cabinet of curiosities, its Delacroix pictures, its rosewood piano, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... play one of Chopin's nocturnes. Her fingers rattled against the ivory on a run up the piano. She stopped and took a ring from her right hand; Drake noticed that it was the emerald ring which he had seen winking in the firelight on that evening when she had covered her face from him. She dropped the ring on ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... pianist and composer, born at Pesth; made his debut at nine, and by 17 had won a reputation throughout the great cities of Europe; in 1838 he settled in Paris, and gave himself to teaching and composition; he ranks beside Chopin as a master of technique; his works are almost entirely ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... M. could have seen this. He was but a year older than F., and yet played with the most astonishing perfection. Among other things the little fellow performed a morceau of his own composition, which was full of pathos, and gave tokens of uncommon ability. His father gave us sonatas of Mozart, Chopin, &c., and a polonaise. The Princess Czartoryski accompanied on the ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... but thoroughly, if somewhat heartlessly, good-natured, and (not merely at the times mentioned, but to the end of her life) an affectionate mother, a delightful hostess, and a very satisfactory friend. No imaginary Stenio or Karol, no actual Sandeau or Musset or Chopin could have caused her at any time of her life the misery which the Prince caused Lucrezia, because she would simply have "sent him walking," as the vigorous French idiom has it. But it pleased her to graft upon her actual ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... to leave Paris.... Of course I was playing Chopin bits, with an ache in my heart to match, that I couldn't bear and was enjoying to the utmost. What do girls play now? Then all of us had attacks of Chopin. Madame used to laugh and say, 'I hear ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... this year the Emperor had some pleasant and some painful experiences. Joachim, the great violinist, and a great favourite of his, died in August, and his death was followed next month, September, by that of the composer Grieg, the "Chopin of the North," as the Emperor called him, whose friendship the Emperor had acquired on one of his Norwegian trips. Quite at the end of the year his early tutor, Dr. Hinzpeter, for whom he always had a ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... other lovely things. In Autumn Leaves, where her bloom is blown away by the fierce ardour of the Wind, and she is left to die forsaken, she recalled a little the moving sadness of her Dying Swan. It was a "choreographic poem" of her own making—to music of CHOPIN—and I think I have never seen anything more fascinating than the colour and movement of the Autumn Leaves and the "splendour and speed" of the Autumn Wind. This was danced by Mr. STOWITTS, and it couldn't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... an effort. Busied with many little cares, she bore them lightly. Her spirit overflowed into the lives around her with delicate sympathy and merry cheer. But it was in music that her nature found its widest outlet. In the lengthening evenings of late August she would play from Schumann, or Chopin, or Grieg, interpreting the vague feelings of gladness or grief which lie too deep for words. Ballads she loved, quaint old English and Scotch airs, folk-songs of Germany, "Come-all-ye's" of Ireland, Canadian chansons. She sang—not like an angel, ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... the knee to superstition— to lend a patient ear to earth's self-constituted vice- gerents of Omniscience. But God spoke to him through nature. The flowers he so passionately loved were reminders of His loving tenderness; in the divine music of Wagner, Liszt and Chopin, he recognized the voice of God. His faith was broad as the universe—deep as infinity. He loved purity; he hated hypocrisy; and for this ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... shall know the texture of men's souls. Old Jolyon could not bear a strong cigar or Wagner's music. He loved Beethoven and Mozart, Handel and Gluck, and Schumann, and, for some occult reason, the operas of Meyerbeer; but of late years he had been seduced by Chopin, just as in painting he had succumbed to Botticelli. In yielding to these tastes he had been conscious of divergence from the standard of the Golden Age. Their poetry was not that of Milton and Byron and Tennyson; of Raphael and Titian; Mozart and Beethoven. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... reculer les divines etoiles." I know not what instrument to compare with his verse. I suppose I should say a flute; but it seems to me more like a marvellously toned piano. His hands pass over the keys, and he produces Chopin-like music. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... not design like art, however realistic she may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them. Chopin was a resume of these inconsequences which God alone can allow Himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... is vastly easier to think of harmonious colors and combinations of dry goods, than it is to puzzle over those knotty subjects we listen to here in the evening, or to translate Chopin or Wagner, or the other ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... at the grand piano and played Chopin's Nocturne in G major, flinging out that elaborate filigree of sound with an impetuosity and superb ABANDON which caused the ladies to exchange astonished glances behind his back. The transitions from the light and ethereal texture of melody to the simple, more concrete theme, which ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... eyes of the old priest, a little American had been brought across the seas to play a reverie of Chopin in the little church ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... before, the flyer, chosen for this mission, would be notified. His companions, too, would hear of the selection; and often indulged, in their own grim humorous way, of reminding him of the fact! The man next to him at the table would softly and weirdly hum a strain from Chopin's Funeral March, setting its music to the solemn words, "Ten thousand dollars going ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... was not acquainted with the Funeral March from Chopin's Pianoforte Sonata. His musical education had, in truth, begun only a year earlier—with the advertisements of the "Pianisto" mechanical player. He was a judge of advertisements, and the "Pianisto" literature pleased him in ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... piano. I make it a point to know the accompaniments, for in case I am ever left without an accompanist, I can play for myself, and it has a great effect on audiences. They may not know or care whether you can play Beethoven or Chopin, but the fact that you can play while you ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... of luxurious leisure. They were never flustered; their employments were a kind of lark, it seemed, never to be referred to except in the most jocular fashion. When Rose had entrusted to the oven a wedding-cake or a pan of jumbles she would repair to the piano for a ten-minute indulgence in Chopin. Similarly indifferent to fate, Nan at intervals in the day drew a tablet and fountain-pen from her sewing-table and recorded some whimsicality which she had seemingly found embedded in the mesh of a shopping-bag she was embellishing. And when, in due course, ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... A guest asked the hostess to play something. Seating herself at the piano, the good woman executed a Chopin nocturne with precision. She finished, and there was still an interval of waiting to be bridged. In the grim silence she turned to an old gentleman ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... the scene was very pretty. My song was quite a success; I had to sing it over again. Then I sang the waltz of Chopin, to which I had put words and transposed two tones lower. I saw Delle Sedie in the audience, with his mouth wide open, trying to breathe for me. It has sixteen bars which must be sung in one breath, and has a compass from D on the upper line to ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... does not insist on acting when the difficult thing is not to act. In "Tartuffe" Coquelin stands motionless for five minutes at a time, without change of expression, and yet nothing can be more expressive than his face at those moments. In Chopin's G Minor Nocturne, Op. 15, there is an F held for three bars, and when Rubinstein played the Nocturne, says Mr. Huneker in his instructive and delightful book on Chopin, he prolonged the tone, "by some miraculous ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... instruments to its furthest limits; for each instrument represents a character to him. Ah! that remark of his about clarionets: "They typify beloved women." Ah! it has always made a shiver run down my back. And Chopin, so dandified in his Byronism; the dreamy poet of those who suffer from neurosis! And Mendelssohn, that faultless chiseller! a Shakespeare in dancing pumps, whose "songs without words" are gems for women of intellect! And after that—after that—a man ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... movement and melodies of the second part that he found most satisfying; but he oftener inclined to the still tenderer themes of Chopin's nocturnes and one of Schubert's impromptus, while the "Lorelei" and the "Erlking" and the Scottish airs never wearied him. Music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days—rich organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... unwittingly so! The other evening I was at Dargenty's, the musician. There were but a few guests, and he was asked to play. Hardly had he begun one off those pretty mazurkas with a Polish rhythm, which make him the successor of Chopin, when his wife began to talk, quite low at first, then a little louder. By degrees the fire of conversation spread. At the end of a minute I was the only listener. Then he shut the piano, and said to me with a heart-rent smile: "It is always like this here—my wife does not care for music." Can ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... who would now say that the pedals should never be used? By their proper use, the student's ear is educated to a refined sense of distinction of consonance and dissonance, and the intention and beauty of Chopin's pedal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various |
