"Sonata" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... itself as I stand at E's, and I therefore proceed with a sonata in F, composed, not by Beethoven, but by a horse-breaker, with certain amplifications of my own: "The young horse was in famous fettle, and framed splendidly over the flakes; but he seemed all of a flabber-gaster when he caught sight of the water, put himself into a regular fandango, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... happily in with 'e con l'aura di fortuna' with which this pastorello sailed along. The character of the music is ease and largeness: as the shepherd lived, so God Almighty walked on the wind. The music breathes ease: but words must tell us who takes it easy. Beethoven's Sonata—Op. 14—is meant to express the discord and gradual atonement of two lovers, or a man and his wife: and he was disgusted that every one did not see what was meant: in truth, it expresses any resistance gradually ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... seventeenth years at the house of General Sowinski's wife in the course of "a few quarter-hours." The Variations sur un air national allemand were published after the composer's death along with his Sonata, Op. 4, by Haslinger, of Vienna, in 1851. They are, no doubt, the identical composition of which Chopin in a letter from Vienna (December 1, 1830) writes: "Haslinger received me very kindly, but nevertheless would publish ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the subject of his writings in "What to Do?" But she urged him, in case he would not consent to justice, to leave the manuscript with her, unpublished, so that the family could use it after his death. (When the book was ready it was named "The Kreutzer Sonata.") ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... Rubinstein, "Die Musik and ihre Meister," p. 8, "Some Remarks on Beethoven's Sonata ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... heard the great pianist, he had bought the best stall procurable some weeks before, and now, after a taxing day in the law courts, had foregone his after-dinner coffee in order not to miss one note of the opening Appassionata; it was a sonata he was very fond of. He sometimes picked out the air of the slow movement on the piano with heavy deliberation; his musical equipment did not carry him as far as ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... safe arrival in Rome, not unduly tired, and with all the dear instruments intact, unharmed by rough hands of porters and Custom House officers, that, one of these days, in three or four months, when I am well, I look forward to contributing the viola da gamba part of a sonata to the concert of the old instrumental music which he will give when he has put his choir in order: you know I used to play that instrument in my young days. A more innocent wish never entered into the heart of a human being, you will say, yet this letter causes ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... Pianoforte often talks of you; in various keys, tunes, and expressions, I allow—but be it Lesson or Country Dance, Sonata or Waltz, you are really its constant theme. I wish you could come and see us, as easily as ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... to those who were its object—having, without the tremor of an eyelid, scanned them like an open page: it was the look, impenetrable, all-seeing, of the physician for his patient. At the piano, a young man was playing the Waldstein Sonata. So intent was he on what he was doing, that his head all but touched the music standing open before him, while his body, bent thus double, swayed vigorously from side to side. His face was crimson, and on his forehead stood out beads of perspiration. He had no cuffs on, and his sleeves ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Scotch, is accepted by Stephen; my second, 'The Body Snatchers,' is laid aside in a justifiable disgust, the tale being horrid; my third, 'The Merry Men,' I am more than half through, and think real well of. It is a fantastic sonata about the sea and wrecks; and I like it much above all my other attempts at story-telling; I think it is strange; if ever I shall make a hit, I have the line now, as ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the program for one number. My selection might have appeared at that particular time as a bit of affectation, but I considered it deeply appropriate; I played Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique." When I sat down at the piano and glanced into the faces of the several hundreds of people who were there solely on account of love or sympathy for me, emotions swelled in my heart which enabled ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... Francaise, for Skinner at the Knickerbocker—and it was stentorian applause and sincere—but I have never heard applause like the applause of the audience of these drabber halls. The thunders of the storm king are as a sonata against the staggering artillery of approbation when Pharnel of the Montparnasse sings "C'est pas difficile"; the howlings of the north wind are as zephyrs against the din of eulogy when Marius Reybas of the Bobino lifts a mighty larynx ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... go home, and put the finishing touch to my sonata for the piano-forte; but it is not yet eleven o'clock, and, withal, a beautiful summer night. I will lay any wager, that, at my next-door neighbour's, (the Oberjagermeister,) the young ladies are sitting at the window, screaming down into ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... from me and explored the rack of music rolls, became interested and took a piece, the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... by the advertisements that the Fokines are to dance Beethoven's "Moonshine" sonata. The hootch-kootch, as ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... and most atrocious outrage on good taste in this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as "the Hammerklavier." All musicians of finer feeling should unite to kill this ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... acquainted with the great Gounod and with the brilliant but erratic Offenbach. Gounod introduced her to many of the greatest composers and singers. Among her friendliest acquaintances she numbered Wagner and Liszt. The latter wrote her a sonata to sing, and Wagner tried to get her permission for him to introduce her into the trilogy he was then at work upon. Meissonier made an exquisite study of her, and the younger Dumas made her the heroine of one of his brightest comedies, "La Petite Americaine." There was ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... play a Mozart sonata yet, Isabel? The more need to practice. All one's life is a music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time. But there must ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... all—that is, reconstructing for himself a part of descriptive Geometry; the herdsman Mangia Melo, manipulating figures, when five years old, as rapidly as a calculating machine; Mozart, executing a sonata on the pianoforte with four-years-old fingers, and composing an opera at the age of eight; Theresa Milanollo, playing the violin at four years, with such eminent skill that Baillot said she must have played it before she was born; Rembrandt, drawing with masterly power ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... of breadth and symmetry and that sort of thing! Now do you think we might vary that noble masterpiece with a waltz?" Can we blame the poor fellow? Wagner represents a noise to him, and the awful scorn and despair of the first movement in the "Moonlight Sonata" only lead him to say, "Heavy play with that left hand. Can't he go faster over the treble, or whatever they call it?" He wants intelligible musical ideas, and we have no right to begin "level-raising" ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Music. — N. music; concert; strain, tune, air; melody &c. 413; aria, arietta[obs3]; piece of music[Fr], work, number, opus; sonata; rondo, rondeau[Fr]; pastorale, cavatina[obs3], roulade[obs3], fantasia, concerto, overture, symphony, variations, cadenza; cadence; fugue, canon, quodlibet, serenade, notturno [Italian], dithyramb; opera, operetta; oratorio; composition, movement; stave; passamezzo [obs3][Italian], toccata, Vorspiel ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... | | 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 | | larghetto movement). ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... imprisonment, etc. Many of the religious tracts belong to literature by the beauty and simple directness of their style. Two short stories and one long novel, all written with a didactic purpose, are of this period, and added to their author's reputation: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreuzer Sonata," ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... difference had been pointed out to him many times. He liked Larkspur and Canterbury bells, or was it their names that he loved them for? He sometimes mistook one for the other just as Ellen mistook one sonata for another, but she always liked ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... she said in her natural voice, looking down at Mark. She said to herself rebelliously, "I've expended enough personality and energy on this performance to play a Beethoven sonata at a concert," and found she was quoting something Vincent Marsh had said about her life, the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... besought, was amazed, or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning, always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he remembered—it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the myrtle wreath on her head—gave the impulse to the stirring presto in the first movement of a quartette. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... was a girl with no manner at all. She looked rather like a superior sort of housemaid. She could get through a sonata, she wrote a pretty English hand, knew French grammar and orthography—a complete commercial education, in short. She was impatient enough to be married and leave the paternal roof, finding it as dull at home as a ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... Harriet or Ann Spencer who brought it in—when It came in, Dick, who pretends to be abashed upon such occasions, gave one swift glance upward and then emitted a long, low, expressive whistle. When Beethoven found himself throbbing with undescribable emotions he composed a sonata; when Keats felt odd things stirring within him he wrote an ode to an urn, but my friend Dick, quite as evidently on fire with his emotions, merely whistled—and then looked around evidently embarrassed lest he should have infringed upon ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general human sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a stranger's house than it would have received from its actual parents. Not even Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we suspect about it. When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be necessary to the child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are probably wrong to inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The natural course is for the parents ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... me'; there is no next, you young fool." Then he went in to his piano and caressed the keys till they yielded their ineffable sweetness in the half-sad tones of Handel's "Messiah"; afterward, to lift his spirits, they gave him a glittering sonata from Mozart. But it is better to feel than to think. It is sweeter to weep than to laugh. So when he was tired of the classics, he played over and over again, in weird, minor, improvised variations, his love of loves, "Annie Laurie," and tears came to his eyes because he was both happy and ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... you can't serve the Lord better than by singing beautiful songs to the weary people of this earth. To wear out a voice like that on pinchbeck hymn tunes is a crime." Then, as if becoming conscious of a neglect of the girl, he added: "Now that you are in the mood, Miss Lambert, you must try that sonata again." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... considered a purely independent and parallel growth, it is not too much to assert that without Sebastian Bach and his matchless studies for the piano, organ, and orchestra, we could not have had the varied musical development in sonata and symphony from such masters as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Three of Sebastian Bach's sons became distinguished musicians, and to Emanuel we owe the artistic development of the sonata, which in its turn became the ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... means first-rate. We have remained arid, hard, incapable of absorbing, while whole Joachim quartets flowed and rippled all round, but never into, us; and then, some other time, our soul seems to have drunk up (every fibre blissfully steeping) a few bars of a sonata (it was Beethoven's 10th violin, and they were stumbling through it for the first time) heard accidentally while walking up and down under an ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... morning cup of ale duly, is a mystery. 'Twas stealing a match before one's face in earnest. But certainly we had not a dream of your appropinquity. I instantly prepared an Epithalamium, in the form of a Sonata—which I was sending to Novello to compose—but Mary forbid it me, as too light for the occasion—as if the subject required anything heavy— so in a tiff with her I sent no congratulation at all. Tho' I promise you ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... aside her long, soft coat—that looked like nobody else's coat—and, thin and black and idle, she sat in a low chair by the fire, and put out her hand for her cup. 'I've been to a musical,' she said. And she told them how she had been wedged into a corner for an interminable sonata and hadn't been able to get away. 'I tried to, once, but my hostess saw me and made a most ominous hiss at me; every one's eye was turned on me, and I sank back again, covered with shame ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata, called Appassionata. There is one here who plays that, and because it tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems to ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... we get from it depends almost entirely upon our own intensity of application and upon our knowledge of the themes and of the general purpose of the work. Only with increased familiarity does the architecture stand revealed. Beethoven, it is said, when once asked the meaning of a sonata of his, played it over again and replied, "It means that." Music is itself. The question for every music-lover is: can I equip myself in such a way as to feel at home in this language, to receive the message as directly as possible, and finally with perfect ease ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... has one desire, which, in spite of a fathomless purse, seemed difficult at first to fulfil. What she wants is to play a sonata with the orchestra of the Conservatoire, rien de moins! She begged me to ask Auber how much it would cost. After due reflection he answered, twelve hundred francs. She was quite surprised at this modest ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... her hand upon Helen's, while with parted lips she gazed at the musicians who were making the fairy-like music which so enthralled her. Her sensitive lips quivered, and her breath came quickly as the orchestra played the varying movements of a grand sonata. ...
— Randy and Her Friends • Amy Brooks
... a certain amateur violinist whose professed fondness for the extreme upper notes of his instrument was such as to incite Haydn to perpetrate a joke at his expense. He therefore wrote a seemingly simple sonata for piano and violin, which he called 'Jacob's Dream,' and dispatched it anonymously to the conceited violinist. The player was charmed with the manner in which the piece began. It was apparent that the composer thoroughly ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... reproduce the individuality which characterizes the handwriting of myriads of different persons. Personality, then, is the virtuoso's one great unassailable stronghold. It is personality that makes us want to hear a half dozen different renderings of a single Beethoven sonata by a half dozen different pianists. Each has the charm and flavor of ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... involved in setting the orchestra above that mighty union of orchestra, organ, and voices which we get in the oratorio. When the reason alleged for ranking the symphony above the oratorio leads us likewise to rank the sonata above the symphony, we seem to have reached ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... protestations that they would like anything she would play, and after a moment's hesitation . . . it was always a leap in the dark to play to people about whose musical capacities you hadn't the faintest idea . . . she took out the Beethoven Sonata album and turned to the Sonata Pathetique. Beethoven of the early middle period was the safest guess with such entirely unknown listeners. For all that she really knew, they might want her to play ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... able to perceive the immense significance of being able to regard any sequence of natural causation as the merely phenomenal aspect of the ontological reality—the merely outward manifestation of an inward meaning. Thus, for example, I am listening to a sonata of Beethoven's played by Madame Schumann. Helmholtz tells me all that he knows about the physics and physiology of the process, both beyond and within my brain. But I feel that, even if Helmholtz were able to tell me very much more than he can, so long ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... his head, strikes the massive opening chords of a Beethoven sonata. There is a sudden hush and each note is heard clearly. The tempo of the first movement, which begins after a grand pause, is allegro con brio, and the first subject is given out in a sparkling cascade of sound. But, despite the buoyancy of the music, there ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... pleading, the mysterious influence over the recluse of the spirit of Astarte. As in all works of this kind the music cannot be readily appreciated without a knowledge of the poem which it illustrates.[193] As for the structure, Schumann clings too closely to the Sonata-form. The music is eloquent just in proportion as he gives his fancy free rein; where he tries to force the themes into an arbitrary mould, the result is unsatisfactory—especially the development, which is neither very dramatic nor interesting from ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... favorite publisher's shop]; and Mr. Norris's Poem on Friendship, a work, which I doubt, though honored with a ghost's approbation, we may now seek for as vainly as Correlli tormented his memory to recover the sonata which the devil played to him in a dream. Presently after, from former habits we may suppose, the guest desires a cup of tea; but, bethinking herself of her new character, escapes from her own proposal by recollecting that ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... she never did. They are not satisfied with hearing her once. They ask for more, and they get it. The other evening I had to keep quiet on my chair while she thumped through four pieces one after the other, including the Beethoven Sonata. We knew it was the Beethoven Sonata. She told us before she started it was going to be the Beethoven Sonata, otherwise, for all any of us could have guessed, it might have been the 'Battle of Prague.' We all sat round with wooden faces, staring ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... civilization. The Goths and Visigoths were models of cleanliness and avatars of intelligence compared with a majority of the seventy different breeds of bipedal brutes who acknowledge the rule of the Romanoffs. A Russian peasant smells like the Chicago river on a summer's day, or Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata." He's more disagreeable to the olfactories than old John Jacob Astor's hide house, from whose effluvia sprung the master spirits of Gotham's Four Hundred. He will eat what would send a coyote howling out of the country. To him a jug of train-oil were as angel-food, a keg of stale soap-grease ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a sonata. Uncle William apparently went to sleep. Sergia, watching him, smiled gently. He must be very tired, poor dear. The next number will keep him awake all right. It did. It was sung by a famous baritone—"Fifteen men on a dead man's chest! Yo ho! Yo ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... of your kind souvenir, I take the liberty to send you some variations, and a Rondo with violin accompaniment. I have a great deal to do, or I would long since have transcribed the Sonata I promised you. It is as yet a mere sketch in manuscript, and to copy it would be a difficult task even for the clever and practised Paraquin [counter-bass in the Electoral orchestra]. You can have the Rondo copied, ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... fail to be impressed by the solidity of the composition, to which the colour is not an added charm, but of which it is an integral part; he will feel that the picture holds together as a unity in the way that a good sonata holds, in a way that nothing else does in this exhibition; also he will feel a certain dissatisfaction which may cause him to inquire whether Mr. Lewis has altogether succeeded in expressing himself. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... it is hoped will lend additional brightness to the vivacious criticisms of The Times, is not to be confined to Opera. The ASTRONOMER-ROYAL will be asked to record his impressions of BEETHOVEN'S "Moonlight Sonata", and the officials of our leading lightships will be asked to report upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... especially belong to you. Usually a woman gives up her own name and takes her husband's—" An idea forced itself upon her and made her blush. She took Roger's hand and led him to the open piano.—"Listen," said she, "I can play my sonata now like an angel!" and her fingers were already running over the ivory keys, when she felt herself seized round ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... stanch friend through everything to the young composer. Cannabich had a daughter named Rosa, a girl of thirteen, exceedingly pretty and clever, and Wolfgang appears to have admired her very much, and perhaps for a time to have flirted and been in love with her. He wrote her a sonata, and was delighted with the way in which she played it; the andante, he said, he had composed to represent her, and when it was finished he vowed she was just what the andante was. But this little love affair, if it existed, soon was forgotten in a more serious ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... may come when a German street-band will be recognized as a powerful tonic; a cornet solo will take the place of a blister; a symphony or a sonata may be recommended instead of morphine; the moxa will give way to Wagner, and opium to Brahms. A prolonged shake by a singer will drive out chills and fever, according to the theory of Hahnemann. Cots at symphony concerts may ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... same country-house. It is raining outside. A drawing-room with a grand piano. Tnya has just finished playing a sonata of Schumann's and is sitting at the piano. Stypa is standing by the piano. Bors is sitting. Lyba, Lisa, Mitrofn Ermlych and the young Priest are ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... beautiful song-melody with an artistic accompaniment, so arranged that all can be played upon the piano, you will understand what the third style is. It is wonderfully free, surely; sometimes proceeding in full free chords, as in the opening measures of the B flat Sonata of Beethoven,[49] again running away from all freedom back to the old style, until the picture looks as old as a monkish costume ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... drew near the Lawrence Hotel at Luray, the Moonlight Sonata floated dreamily upon the calm night air, and we seemed to feel the beauty of ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Valkyrie;" and now the driving rain and the salt spindrift, the flapping of the leech of our brown sail, every note of accompaniment is being given to that great air that runs through Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, which the wind is singing louder and louder. Tim sits up well to windward, the tiller quivering in his hand, the rain beating on one side of his face, his beard blowing out from the other. Tim doesn't ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... "Jim has been eating his heart out in the den every since dinner; Dal played the Sonata Appasionata backward on the pianola—he wanted to put through one of Anne's lingerie waists, on a wager that it would play a tune; I played craps with Lollie, and Flannigan has ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Lancelot, when Peter went at ten. "My poor Beethoven! What you must have suffered! Never mind, I'll play you your Moonlight sonata." ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... contadini have done their day's work he takes it on him to read aloud to them the poems of the revolutionary Venetian poet Dall' Ongaro, to their great applause. Then I must tell you of his music. He is strong in music for ten years old—and plays a sonata of Beethoven already (in E flat—opera 7) and the first four books of Stephen Heller; to say nothing of various pieces by modern German composers in which there is need of considerable execution. Robert is the maestro, and sits by him two hours every day, with an amount of patience and persistence ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... The Sonata, Op. 22, "Out of the year 1802." If Marx will turn to the letters to Hofmeister again, he will find this Sonata offered for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... his father. The pupil was Rose Cannabich, to whom the sonata referred to is dedicated. Her father, whom Mozart admired greatly as an able conductor, was Chapelmaster of the excellently trained orchestra at Mannheim. He lived from 1731 to 1798. [The Andante from which trouble was expected was that which Mozart wrote with the purpose that ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... here calling upon her brother and Monsieur Parole for some more of their concerted music, they sat down to a sonata of Beethoven. The remainder of us broke up into little coteries; Min and I having a long quiet talk, under cover of the deep tones of the vicar's violoncello, in a corner by the piano, where we entrenched ourselves ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... it a penitential psalm you're singing, or is my friend Mike endeavoring to raise your spirits with a Galway sonata?" ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the hubbub, intoxicated her; she made up stories by the dozen, as her dark eyes followed the gay equipages. When Fraeulein summoned her she went away reluctantly; the stories got into her head, and stopped there all the time she laboured through that long sonata. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... orchestral movement, color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an altogether different stirring of the musical caldron. A song of Moussorgsky's or Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelleas" or "Le Sacre du printemps," a single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite of Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of the older music can equal. For our own moment of action is ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... whistled, hummed tunes, gone accurately through the whole of Beethoven's Sonata in B, to let him know that I was within hearing, but he never ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... wearers. I saw no similar ones on the necks of the present generation. After the coffee was served and a certain time allowed for breathing, the daughter of the house sat down, without being begged, at an upright piano, and attacked the "Moonlight Sonata." This seemed to be the signal for the ladies to ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... may be cited some examples of artistic, literary and scientific production in dreams. I will recall only the well-known anecdote told of Tartini, a violinist-composer of the eighteenth century. As he was trying to compose a sonata and the muse remained recalcitrant, he went to sleep and he saw in a dream the devil, who seized his violin and played with master hand the desired sonata. Tartini wrote it out from memory when he woke. It has come to us under the name of "The Devil's Sonata." But it ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... sleep," Dormer Colville had said to his cousin. And at length Turner succumbed to the soft effect of a sonata. He even snored in the shade of a palm, and the gaiety of the proceedings ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... the Professor, some evening when I have nothing else to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as one of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius. The vox humana of the great Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... any one who looked at my song "Man in Vain" in Ulysses might think it was taken from "Batti, batti." I should like to say it was taken from, or suggested by, a few bars in the opening of Beethoven's pianoforte sonata op. 78, and a few bars in the accompaniment to the duet "Hark how the Songsters" in Purcell's Timon of Athens. I am not aware of having borrowed more in the song than what follows as natural development of these two ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... who is hopelessly ignorant of music, ever keeps silence while the Moonlight-Sonata ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... and in many other German towns there are certain streets where one side, for reasons no one can explain, is taboo at certain hours of the day; not of the night, but of the day. You may go to a music shop at midday to buy a sonata, and find, if you are a girl, that you have committed a crime. The intercourse between young people outside their homes is hedged round with convention. German titles of address are so absurdly formal that ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... to the bicycles, if Magdalen had not felt that the time was come for asserting authority, and said, "Not yet, if you please. We cannot waste whole days. You know Herr Gnadiger is coming to-morrow, and it would be well to practise that sonata beforehand; you ought each to practise it; Paula, you had better begin, and Vera, you prepare this first scene of Marie Stuart to read with me when Thekla's lessons are over. Change over when ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... were obliged to keep strictly to their practising time-table, and Raymonde was due at the piano in the sanctum from 5.30 until 6.15. At 5.40, which was fully ten minutes late, the strains of her Beethoven Sonata began to resound down the passage. Mademoiselle, passing from her bedroom, stood for a moment to listen. She was impressed by the fact that Raymonde was playing much better than usual, and performing in ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... taught him that men are sensual beings, and that sensualism must die for want of food if it were not for sex instincts, if it were not for Art, and especially for Music. This view of life he forcibly expressed in the "Kreutzer Sonata," in which Woman and Music, the two magnets of his youth, were impeached as powers of evil. Already, in "War and Peace" and in "Anna Karenina," his descriptions of female charms resembled catalogues of weapons against which a man must arm himself or perish. The beautiful Princess Helena, with ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... when her emotions were whipped by an attachment—for the tenor of Roger's life, with its whole-hearted collection of house property, had induced in his only daughter a tendency towards passion—she turned to great and sincere work, choosing the sonata form, for the violin. This was the only one of her productions that troubled the Forsytes. They felt at once that it would ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this poem: "The Toccata as a form of composition is not the measured, deliberate working-out of some central musical theme as is the Sonata or sound-piece. The Toccata, in its early and pure form, possessed no decided subject, made such by repetition, but bore rather the form of a capricious Improvisation, or 'Impromptu.'" ("A Toccata of Galuppi's" by ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the ignorance of this music among piano teachers and students is a crying shame. What modern piano sonata have we to-day, to compare with his? I know of none. And the songs—are they not wonderful! I love the man and his music so much that I am doing what lies in my power to make these compositions better known. There is need of pioneer ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... Jesus, a look, a word sufficed Francis to attach to himself men who would follow him until their death. It is impossible, alas! to analyze the best of this eloquence, all made of love, intimate apprehension, and fire. The written word can no more give an idea of it than it can give us an idea of a sonata of Beethoven or a painting by Rembrandt. We are often amazed, on reading the memoirs of those who have been great conquerors of souls, to find ourselves remaining cold, finding in them all no trace of animation ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier |
