"Chopin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impetuous visitor, Mrs. Fleming gave in. She pulled a volume of Chopin from the stand, and began the twelfth nocturne. It was years since she had played it, but as she touched the keys the old spirit crept back into her fingers, and the notes came rippling out delicately and easily. Diana, sunk back in the recesses of the long basket-chair, ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... shop she spoke no more about 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 ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... 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 by a whole family. A would-be graduate ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Thursday, November 27. Bedad, then, 'tis Misther Paddy REWSKI himself that is the broth of a boy entirely at the piano-forte, but, Begorra, he's better at the piano than the forte. He gave us a nice mixture of HANDEL, BEETHOVEN, CHOPIN, LISZT, and then a neat little compo of his own, consisting of a charming theme, with mighty ingenious and beautiful variations, all his own, divil a less. Great success for Paddy REWSKI. The Irish Pole, or Pole-ished ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... the occupations 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 ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... the breeze which sighs through the branches, and cloud-shadows flitting over 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, when the world seems fullest of beauty, one feels most strongly that it is but the harbinger ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... 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? He ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... clover-blooms, fair, stately heads 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 ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... your left is a door. There are many books in the room, hardly any pictures, a statuette perhaps. The owner evidently sets beauty of form before beauty of colour. It is a woman's room and it has a certain delicate austerity. By the time you have observed everything MRS. FARRANT has played Chopin's prelude opus 28, number 20 from ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... know, will sit twelve or fifteen hours, without the least weariness, listening to what cultivated Europeans all consider as a mere charivari. When London gladly endures fifteen-hour concerts, composed of morceaux by Wagner, Chopin, and Liszt, I will believe that art can ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... 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
... modern piano 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
... to the eyes of the old priest, a little American had been brought across the seas to play a reverie of Chopin in ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy
... 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 ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... deserted in our corner. The company had strayed in, one by one, to the large salon with the great piano, where a young Russian musician, a pupil of Chopin, sat down to play, with no conventional essay of preliminary chords, an expected morsel. The strains of it wailed in just then, through the heavy, screening curtains; a mad valse of his own, that no human feet could dance to, a pitiful, passionate thing that ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... him as one of intensely active affections and highly impressionable temperament. Various anecdotes represent Beethoven as very susceptible and very passionate. Mendelssohn is described by those who knew him to have been full of fine feeling. And the almost incredible sensitiveness of Chopin has been illustrated in the memoirs of George Sand. An unusually emotional nature being thus the general characteristic of musical composers, we have in it just the agency required for the development of recitative and song. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Chopin's Marche Funebre affects me very disagreeably. The music is, to me, absolutely repugnant. The beautiful melody in the second movement is, however, to me exceedingly agreeable and affords me intense pleasure and gratification. The lower animals are likewise agreeably or disagreeably ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... 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 the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... at 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 ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... Paderewski, 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" of ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... 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 rhymed ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... 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 ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... quiet manners and correct, 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 ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... kindly, and loving, what care I if at sixteen years 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 the autumnal woods shall teach her tint and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... lived a 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 ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... 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
... the 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... functionaries began to form an aisle among the spectators, and emotion grew tenser. The organ was silent for a moment, and when it recommenced its song the song was the supreme expression of human grief, the dirge of Chopin, wrapping the whole cathedral in heavy folds of sorrow. And as that appeal expired in the pulsating air, the fresh voices of little boys, sweeter even than grief, ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... friends-refined Maiden Ladies with ideals and long noses, who live at Hampstead or Putney, and play Chopin with passion. On sad autumn afternoons I would go and have tea with them, and talk of the spiritual meaning of Beethoven's late Sonatas; or discuss in the twilight the pathos of life and ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... fail to tell of all the varied work, from the tiny tots with their kindergarten plays to the sturdy farmers and engineers. Let others decide whether it is better for the young ladies to do neat and tasteful needle work or play a selection from Chopin. ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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, and Heine. It was during this year that ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... 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 ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... 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 ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... 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 ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... had occasion to observe the susceptibility of dogs to music. It may here suffice to give one personal observation. A dog (of mixed breed, partly collie), very well known to me, on hearing a nocturne of Chopin, whined and howled, especially at the more pathetic passages, once or twice catching and drawing out the actual note played; he panted, walked about anxiously, and now and then placed his head on the player's lap. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 the character with ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... observe the movement, and had taken an andantino for an andante. At her solicitation he took her place at the instrument, and executed the andantino as few but professional artists could do. Mlle. Moiseney, ever ready with her enthusiasm, declared that he must be a Liszt or a Chopin, and implored him to play her something else, to which he consented with good grace. After this they talked about music and many other things. The man with the green eyes possessed one quality in common with Socrates, he was master in the art of interrogating, and Mlle. Moiseney loved to talk. ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... voice did not please everyone, for it was by no means smooth and velvety. Indeed, it was a little harsh and was likened to the taste of a bitter orange. But it was just the voice for a tragedy or an epic, for it was superhuman rather than human. Light things like Spanish songs and Chopin mazurkas, which she used to transpose so that she could sing them, were completely transformed by that voice and became the playthings of an Amazon or of a giantess. She lent an incomparable grandeur to tragic parts and to the severe ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... his court usually being present. It was not until this time, however, that Chase felt that he could sit through a concert without being bored to extinction. He loved music, but not the kind that the royal orchestra rendered; Wagner, Chopin, Mozart were all the same to him—he hated them fervently and he was not yet given to stratagems and spoils. He sat at a table with the French attache just below the box occupied by the Princess and her party. In spite of the fact that he was a gentleman, ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 meeting with an enthusiastic reception. ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... Mozley said that Chopin was "certainly a Manichean; he did not believe in God; he believed in some spirit, not in God;" while "the moral grandeur of Beethoven's genius was always present to him, as, with less force, was also Mendelssohn's: 'They ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... 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 voyageur as''Arabella.'' By Liszt she had ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the porch, he stopped as he was descending the stairs. A German voice said, 'Sure enough, my jolly landlord, she's there, in Worms—your Bormio. Found her at the big hotel: spoke not a syllable; stole away, stole away. One chopin of wine! I'm off on four legs to the captain. Those lads who are after her by Roveredo and Trent have bad noses. "Poor nose—empty belly." Says the captain, "I stick at the point of the cross-roads." Says I, "Herr ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bit embarrassing. Don Manuel was a music-lover, and especially fond of Bach. I had had long talks with the young king at various times, and my sympathies had been aroused in his behalf. On the evening of which I speak I played a Chopin Nocturne, and I know that into my playing there went some of my feeling for the pathos of the situation of this young stranger in a strange land, of my own age, eating the bitter bread of exile. When I had finished, the Marchioness of Ripon touched ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... guests took their coffee in the music room, where Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum ragtime, and give his celebrated imitation of the boardingschool girl's execution of Chopin. He flatly refused to play anything more serious, and would practice only in the morning, when he had the music room to himself. Hamilton and M. Roux repaired to the smoking room to discuss the necessity of extending the tax on manufactured ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... 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 means," so that "it swelled and diminished, and went singing ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... It was Chopin she played to-night, and Quarles, who had been more interested in her than in the rest of the company, immediately lost himself in the music. He applauded as vociferously as any one in the audience, and after the performance would talk of nothing ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... of genius as sensitive as Hawthorne's in various branches of art: Shelley and Southey, Schubert and Chopin, Correggio and Corot. Southey not only blushed red but blushed blue—as if the life were going out of him; and in Chopin and Correggio at least we feel that they could not have been what they were without it. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... instructive matter as to the accomplishment of paintings and frescoes; that Thackeray or Dickens or Meredith or George Sand were known to have answered inquiries as to 'How to write a Novel'; or that Beethoven or Wagner or Chopin or Mendelsohn paused in the midst of their careers in order to tell newspaper men what they considered the true method of composing music. These fortunate people—as well as others of their time—could so easily be silent and thus avoid disclosing the fact that they could ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... 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 have been in better hands or feet. M. VOLININE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... excluded all others. And yet how few years had passed since Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert lived among us! True, Mendelssohn's star was ascending, and there were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole, Chopin; but it was later that these gained their lasting influence. One day the idea took possession of our young and hot heads,—Let us not idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the Poetry of Art shall be again enthroned!" Then gathered together a Protestant-league of music, whose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... chucked out of 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... and pouring them into water and salting a wild tract of land with them; organizing a band of miners, whom he led as if with keen scent to the right spot and rediscovered his nuggets, everything being done mysteriously and as a tribal secret. Loti had a new feeling for the haunting music of Chopin, which he had been taught to play but had not been interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of an elder brother, with the idea of going to the South Sea Islands, and this became a long obsession which finally led him to ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... began herself to discuss Motchalov, and did not confine herself to sighs and interjections only, but uttered a few true observations full of feminine insight in regard to his acting. Mihalevitch spoke about music; she sat down without ceremony to the piano, and very correctly played some of Chopin's mazurkas, which were then just coming into fashion. Dinner-time came; Lavretsky would have gone away, but they made him stay: at dinner the general regaled him with excellent Lafitte, which the general's lackey hurried off in a street-sledge to Dupre's to ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... 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 ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... was a good musician and had the well-taught 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 ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... was equal to eighteen sous of our money; but it diminished gradually in value, and under Diocletian its value was not above nine sous of French money, and 45 centimes. The Roman pound was equivalent to 12 ounces, and the sextarius which was the sixth part of a conge, came near to the old Paris chopin, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... masculine given name, and the surname of a political assassin, George Sand. The man was a Polish musician, of delicate constitution, who seemed to leave a portion of his existence in each one of his works, and who felt himself dying at twenty-nine years of age. He was called Frederic Francois Chopin. The children belonged to the novelist, who was ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... wax candles in the darkened room, Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead, An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid. We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger tips. "So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul Should be resurrected only among friends Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room." —And so the conversation slips Among velleities and carefully caught regrets Through attenuated tones of violins ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... and remade, wondered why her four young charges were so glum. There was nothing in the world she loved so much as a symphony orchestra. She sat back in her chair, close to the edge of the box, with a happy sigh, and studied her program. Everything that she liked best, Chopin, Saint-Saens, and Wagner—Siegfried's Death. Gyp, eyeing her chaperon's happy anticipation, indulged in a ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... hapless Feodor during an evening call he interned him in the vitals of a tuneless Baby Grand, and for three hours played on him CHOPIN'S polonaise in A flat major, with the loud pedal down. On his release Feodor had lost his reason and rushed to the nearest police-station to ask to be sent to the Front immediately. His object, he explained, was to end the War. The Bulgar authorities thought the plan worth trying ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... ethereally civilized and worldly and well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a 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
... Museum, there is nothing to say that the guide-book would not say better. In the museum, a tattered Polish flag of red silk, with the white eagle, a cheerful bird with curled tail, opened mouth, chirping defiantly to the left, imprest me, and a portrait of Szopen (Chopin) in fine profile when laid out dead. For amusement, there was a Paul Potter bull beside a Paul Potter willow, delightfully unconscious of a coming Paul Potter thunderstorm, and a miniature of Shakespeare which did not resemble any of the portraits of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... was now allowed a moment's rest. The whole way from the church it had played incessantly an indescribable air; and it was only in the evening, when an account appeared in the papers, that the air was recognized as Chopin's Funeral March. ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... about "those others." Her playing had aroused a fever of enthusiasm. "What passion!" "What an artist!" "I have always said no one could play Chopin like Mademoiselle Reisz!" "That last prelude! Bon Dieu! It shakes ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... O Musician, the piece that you played Is naught but a copy of Chopin or Spohr; That the ballad you sing is but merely "conveyed" From the stock of the Ames and the Purcells of yore; That there's nothing, in short, in the words or the score, That is not as out-worn as the "Wandering ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... has taught me, to charm his ears and those of other people. Oh! I can do it very well. Won't you come and hear me play the castanets, if Monsieur Enguerrand can spare you? There is a young Polish pianist who is to play our accompaniment. Ah, there is nothing like a Polish pianist to play Chopin! He is charming, poor young man! an exile, and in poverty; but he is cared for by those ladies, who take him everywhere. That is the sort of life I should like—the life of Madame Strahlberg—to be a young widow, free to ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... epoch. From the time of Liszt, who not only revolutionized the performance of music on the piano, 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 ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... playing world do without the music of Frederic Chopin? We can hardly think of the piano without thinking of Chopin, since he wrote almost exclusively for the universal instrument. His music touches the heart always rather than the head, the emotional message far outweighs the intellectual ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... reproduce 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 ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... equanimity: she would raise her whole being to the level of her sublime passion. She would practise charity, humility, piety,—in fine, all the virtues: together with certain morceaux of Beethoven and Chopin. She would walk the earth like one glorified. She would do homage to the best of men by inviolate secrecy. Here, by I know not what gentle transition, as she lay in the quiet darkness, Elizabeth covered her pillow with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... a couple of hundred yards back from Huferschingen; but it had been made the headquarters of the keepers, and just outside this room there were a number of pegs for them to sling their guns and bags on when they came in of an evening to have a pipe and a chopin of white wine. Ziska's uncle and aunt were both large, stout, and somnolent people, very good-natured and kind, but a trifle dull. Ziska really had the management of the place, and she was not slow to lend a hand if the servants were remiss in waiting on us. But that, it ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... temper—after you gentlemen have left," remarked Miss Georgie, significantly; and then she prattled away in this careful undertone. "What horrid stuff that fantasia is; don't you think so? A mixture of Wagner, and Chopin, and 'Home, Sweet Home.' Lady Adela has put you in her novel. Oh, yes, she has; she showed me the last pages this morning. You remember the young married English lady who is a great poetess?—well, she is rescued from drowning in the Bay of Syracuse by ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black |
