"Beethoven" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to kill time some way or another that Wednesday afternoon, while the sun shone through the ancient windows, and the birds sang their springtime songs in the trees outside, the Countess having retired to the music room to hammer Beethoven,—or maybe it was Mendelssohn,—out ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... and mental defects and differences in and of themselves tend to separate the individual from his group. The deaf-mute and the blind are deprived of normal avenues to communication. "My deafness," wrote Beethoven, "forces me to live in exile." The physically handicapped are frequently unable to participate in certain human activities on equal terms with their fellows. Minor physical defects and marked physical variations from the normal tend to become ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the least theatrical of men, and placed this piece of mortifying misunderstanding in bronze under the very eaves of the house that grew out of his simple eloquence. There is in Leipsic a similar misdemeanor in a statue of Beethoven. He sits, naked to the waist, in a bronze chair, with a sort of bath-towel drapery of colored marble about his legs, and an eagle in front of him. He has a chauffeurish expression of anxious futility, as though he were about ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Hall was packed from end to end one summer afternoon by an eager mob of music lovers—or, at least, of those who counted themselves as such. The last Philharmonic Concert of the season had been announced; and as one of its items was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the crowd was, as usual on such an occasion, a great ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... illustration Ludwig van Beethoven, who was born at Bonn, Prussia, in the year 1770. His father was a musician, and suffered from two great foes,—a violent temper, and a habit of drink. The family being poor, young Ludwig was made to submit to a severe training on the violin from the time he was four years ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... theories of electricity, for example. Why may it not be so with the world? Why may there not be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all data harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choose between, or simply cumulate one upon another? A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... couple of hours examining its souvenirs with loving interest. He liked to see the places and the houses associated with the names or lives of great men. On our homeward journey down the Rhine he left us at Bonn to visit the house where Beethoven was born, joining-us ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... are on record several instances when he paraphrased Walther's song to his masters, and signaled the composers who had aided him most in his development. To-day, the debt is very plain. At every turn, one sees him benefiting, and benefiting very beautifully, by the work of Beethoven. The structure of his great and characteristic works is based on the symphonic form. The development of the themes of "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger" and "Parsifal" out of single kernels; the fine logical sequence, the expositions of the thematic material of "Parsifal" in ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... babies on the North Meadow, as did Topp, the drawing-master—Augustus de Lacy Topp—who wore a brown velvet jacket and represented sentiment in a form verging on lunacy; or if he had invited his classes to drink coffee in a very shabby little home, as poor Moossy did, and treated them to Beethoven's Symphonies, then even Jock Howieson, the stupidest lad in the Seminary, would have been shocked, and would have felt that the Creation was out of gear. The last thing we had expected of Bulldog was polite conversation, or private hospitality. His speech ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... the end of it stands the Schloss containing the University, with a library (200,000 volumes) and a museum rich in Roman antiquities. The Muenster (or Cathedral) dates from the 12th and 13th centuries. In the Muensterplatz stands a fine bronze statue of Beethoven, a celebrated German musician, who was born in the Bonngasse, No. 515. This statue faces south, (as do most of the statues that I have seen in Europe, except when the surroundings are unfavorable). One side of the ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... who accuse Landor of having sacrificed all things to style: it were as wise to assert that Beethoven sacrificed harmony to time. If his accusers would but read Landor before criticising, a proper regard for their own reputations would prevent them from hazarding such an opinion. "Style," writes Landor, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Treasury Hymnal there is a Pilgrim Song by Dr. Horatius Bonar, and the music is from Beethoven; it is very sweet and cheering in ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... our compositions new combinations of sounds, but have we in a hundred years made any essential progress even in this part of the art? Have we produced anything, I will not say greater, but anything as great as the noblest works of Bach and Beethoven? ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... suddenly into a rhythmic clatter, always changing in distance and intensity. When it comes near, you should get into a tunnel, and stand there while it passes. I did that once, and it was like the last page of an overture by Beethoven—thunderingly impetuous. I cannot conceive how any person can hope to disparage a train by comparing it with a stage-coach; and I know something of stage-coaches—or, at least, of diligences. Their effect on the men employed ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... recollect (apart from personal reasons) for the sparkling freshness and vigour of the air; for the extent and variety of Golden Gate Park, where I found a bust of Beethoven, but no sign of Bret Harte; for the vast reading-room in the library at Berkeley, a university which is so enchantingly situated, beneath such a sun, and in sight of such a bay, that I marvel that any work can be done there at all; and for the miles and miles of perfect tarmac roads fringed with ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... come back from hearing a great violinist, who played, with three other professors, in two quartettes, Mozart and Beethoven. I know little of the technicalities of music, but I know that the Mozart was full to me of air and sunlight, and a joy which was not the light-hearted gaiety of earth, but the untainted and unwearying joy of heaven; the Beethoven I do not think I understood, but there was a grave ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in Art; yet few of us have taken pains to justify the delight we feel in it. No philosophy can win us away from Shakspeare, Plato, Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, Phidias,—from the masters of sculpture, painting, music, and metaphor. Their truth is larger than any other,—too large to be stated directly and lodged in systems, theories, definitions, or formulas. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... years edited by Schumann,—in what spirit we may gather from his own words:—"The musical state of Germany, at that time, was not very encouraging. On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and Huenten 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim. The critic may try and trace the deferred resolutions of Beethoven {253} to some sense of the incompleteness of the modern intellectual spirit, but the artist would have answered, as one of them did afterwards, 'Let them pick out the fifths and leave us ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... of giving them a more intense and poignant expression, which at some moments is all the divinest music seems to do. Their influence is always benign and serene, and we may always have recourse to it, while the secrets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann lie hidden between leaves, in the keeping of crabbed little hieroglyphs, and a voice, an instrument, or perhaps an orchestra, is needed to reveal them. The picture, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... aside. Likewise he was fond of music, and could accompany himself on the piano as he sang the love songs of his friend A— or gipsy songs or themes from operas; but he had no love for serious music, and would frankly flout received opinion by declaring that, whereas Beethoven's sonatas wearied him and sent him to sleep, his ideal of beauty was "Do not wake me, youth" as Semenoff sang it, or "Not one" as the gipsy Taninsha rendered that ditty. His nature was essentially one ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... at popular prices. The dramas given included fifteen by Schiller, ten by Shakespeare, three by Goethe, three by Lessing, five by Moliere, four by Hans Sachs, four by Sheridan, eleven by Grillparzer, two each by Kleist and Hebbel, and several by Ibsen, while the operas included three by Beethoven, three by Cherubini, six by Mozart, three by Weber, and several by Wagner. Could an English provincial theatre—could all English provincial theatres together—show a record equal to this? That plays of this kind are given is proof that the German public looks ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... there are some sayings, hallowed by long usage, which throng the mind through a whole summer's day, and seem in harmony with its emotions—some portions of the Psalms or lines of greatest poets, inarticulate hymns of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, waifs and strays not always apposite, but linked by strong and subtle chains of feeling with the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential feeling for the Alps is connected with the Pantheistic form of our ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the delusion that genius only makes its appearance twice or thrice during a generation. It is certainly the fact that a Napoleon, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven, is only born once in a century; and colossal intellects such as these are rightly regarded as unnatural phenomena. But genius of a less high order is far more common than is generally supposed. People are simply blind to it. Although it surrounds them ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... more than a rearguard action. As General Thario wrote, "We are fighting on the wrong continent." Joe was even broader and more emphatic. "It's a putup job," he complained, "to keep costplus plants like this operating. If they called off their silly war (Beethoven down in the cellar during the siege of Vienna expresses the right attitude) and went home, the country would fall back into depression, we'd have some kind of revolution ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... from Mozart, Beethoven, und Méhul Mit chorals of Sebastian Bach Soopline und peaudiful. Der Breitmann feel like holy saints, De tears roon down his fuss; Und he sopped out, "got verdammich - dis ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... Scott. Still the monument is an ornament and an honor to the city. This is now the fourth that has been erected within two years to commemorate the triumphs of genius. Monuments that have risen from the same idea, and in such quick succession, to Schiller, to Goethe, to Beethoven, and to Scott, signalize the character of the new era still more happily than does the railroad coming up almost to ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Imperial Opera. But he had no doubt that on a proper proletarian basis it would function with a far more beneficent activity. He pointed out that there was a strong facial resemblance between TROTSKY and M. PADEREWSKI, and between LENIN and BEETHOVEN. In reply to a question from Mr. Moody MacTear, Mr. Ploffskin said that he had been down a coal-mine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... are. It is amusing to read in one of the magazines of 1895 that Miss Keller "has a just and intelligent appreciation of different composers from having literally felt their music, Schumann being her favourite." If she knows the difference between Schumann and Beethoven, it is because she has read it, and if she has read it, she remembers it and can tell any one ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... which their own nature fits them. Even though millions of women are enabled to do the work which men could do better the gain for mankind is nil. To put women to do men's work is (Ellen Key has declared) as foolish as to set a Beethoven or ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... crowbars on the stones, the confused roaring of thousands of voices, the Marseillaise sung in chorus, and the irregular cannonading which resounded from the direction of the Rue Saint-Denis, all composed a strident, stupefying, tempestuous harmony, beside which Beethoven's Tempest would have seemed like ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... her finger into her waistband to show how loose it was, and always ate very little. Lubotshka liked to draw heads; Katenka only flowers and butterflies. The former could play Field's concertos and Beethoven's sonatas excellently, whereas the latter indulged in variations and waltzes, retarded the time, and used the pedals continuously—not to mention the fact that, before she began, she invariably struck three chords ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... Undine tresses and Undine faces; their desolate red deserts grew vaguely populous with mirage mockeries; their green dells and grassy hill-sides, couching careless herds, and fleecy flocks, borrowed all Arcadia's repose; and the marble busts of Beethoven and of Handel, placed on brackets above the piano, shone as if rapt, transfigured in the mighty inspiration that gave to ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... show us how to secure to each performer his voice or his instrument; but it will not show us how to make either the voice or the instrument a good one; nor will it decide whether the orchestra shall perform Beethoven or Offenbach, or whether the chorus shall sing a penitential psalm or a drinking song. When we have discovered what the world's highest gladness can consist of, we will again come to the question of how far such gladness can be a general ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... remaining on either her knuckles or knees and she could walk and move her fingers without pain within a normal range of movement. The big payoff for me besides seeing her look so wonderful (20 years younger and 20 pounds lighter) was to hear her sit down and treat us to a Beethoven recital. And her blood ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... stands a piano-forte, with a number of music-books; upon the walls hang the portraits of Weyse and Beethoven, for our young Baron is musical, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... Reverend Augustus Clare dropped in after dinner, but Rose hardly deigned to look at them. She reclined gracefully on a sofa, with half shut eyes, listening to Kate playing one of Beethoven's "Songs without Words," and seeing—not the long, lamp-lit drawing-room with all its elegant luxuries, or the friends around her, but the bare best room of the old yellow farm-house, and the man lying lonely and ill ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... beauty as not only permissible, but desirable and frequent and of a thousand hitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night in a real rapture, I walked round the upper gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for the first time to great music; I believe now that it was a rendering of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.... ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... every note of the music, turning around and frowning at any unfortunate person in a box who dropped a fan or an opera-glass. It was funny to hear the hum of satisfaction when any well-known movement of Beethoven or Mozart was attacked. The orchestra was perfect, at its best I think in the "scherzos" which they took in beautiful style—so light and sure. I liked the instrumental part much better than the singing. French voices, the women's particularly, are thin, as a rule. ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... over the fence, until Mrs. Duane, seeing the Captain return, ran to him and asked, were the Crows on the war-path? Then her Frank told her yes, and that he had detailed Albumblatt to vanquish them and escort them to Carlisle School to learn German and Beethoven's sonatas. ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... compositions of genius, as much joy and sorrow, as much triumph and humiliation, as would have crowded a much longer lifetime. His early indications of genius are well known, and were indeed wonderful, even as compared with those of other great composers—for Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven, all gave proofs of their musical powers in boyhood—though none of them as children showed that full maturity of mind which distinguished Mozart, and which only a few of those who witnessed it could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... were the subject-matter without meaning, though in truth the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense, still the style would, on that supposition, remain as perfect and original a work as Euclid's "Elements" or a symphony of Beethoven. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Richard Burton) 1821-1881 Extracts from Amiel's Journal: Christ's Real Message Duty Joubert Greeks vs. Moderns Nature, and Teutonic and Scandinavian Poetry Training of Children Mozart and Beethoven ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Beethoven speaks with Milton on this day, And Shakespeare's word with Goethe's beats the sky, In witness of the birthright you betray, In witness of ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... lost in thought. Music, from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, somber and as if coming from ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... guessed which of them was the chosen one. For Richard Wagner—or Richard Geyer, as he was then called, after his stepfather—was by no means a youthful prodigy, like Mozart or Liszt. It is related that Beethoven shed tears of displeasure over his first music lessons; nevertheless, it was obvious from the beginning that he had a special gift for music. Richard Wagner, on the other hand, apparently had none. When he was eight years old ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the same time picturesque, story of Beethoven and his "Fidelio" is told in "Musical Sketches," by Elise Polko, with all the sentimentality that a German writer can command. Whole paragraphs might be lifted from that book and included in this sketch, but the substance of the story ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... that the instrumental tone used to voice the pastoral character of the scene was the same as that which Beethoven used in his "Pastoral" symphony, as Berlioz used in his "Fantastic," as Gounod used in his "Faust," and that thus at least one element of the instrumental embodiment of Poliziano's story has come ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... such simple choices as that between thick soup and clear, then perhaps its rules might be fairly summed up in the utilitarian formula. But in fact, as everyone knows, the choices are far more difficult; they are between, let us say, a bottle of port and a Beethoven symphony; leisure and liberty now, or L1000 a-year twenty years hence; art and fame at the cost of health, or sound nerves and obscurity; and so on, and so on through all the possible cases, infinitely more complex in reality than I could attempt ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... politeness" and of "rights and duties." If this were so, it would suffice to give a minute description of the movements of the hand necessary in playing the piano, to enable an attentive pupil to execute a sonata by Beethoven. In all such matters the "formation" is the essential factor; the powers of will ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... In music Berlioz, at this time a student in the Conservatoire, was fighting hard against Cherubini and the bewigged ones for liberty of expression and leave to admire and imitate the audacities of Weber and Beethoven, and three years hence, in the year of Hernani, was to set his mark upon the art with the Symphonie fantastique. On the stage as early as 1824 Frederick and Firmin had realised in the personages ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... from Sir William Hamilton's Dissertations, besides its wise thought, sounds in the ear like the pathetic and majestic sadness of a symphony by Beethoven:— ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... sing them quite loudly (can you sing them?) or in a medium tone, or you can hum them softly as if to yourself; or further yet, you can think them without making the faintest sound, and every tone will be as plain as when you sang it the loudest. Here, I can tell you that Beethoven wrote many of his greatest works when he was so deaf that he could not hear the music he made. Hence, he must have been able to write it out of his thought just as he wanted it to sound. When you understand these steps and ways you will then know ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... that rounded St. Peter's dome reared it in adoration to Christ, and Raphael in painting the Transfiguration laid his masterpiece at the feet of this Child. Mozart there laid his symphonies, and Beethoven the works of his colossal genius. Shakespeare, "with the best brain in six thousand years," who has poured the many-colored splendors of his imagination over all our life, wrote in his will: "I commend my soul into the ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... be a composer. Glorious! The Pastoral. Beethoven; he's the best of them. Don't you think? Tum, tay, ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the last harpsichords made. The date upon the case was 1802. Beethoven's famous "Moonlight Sonata" was written for either harpsichord or piano. It was published in 1802. Hummel played on the harpsichord as late as 1805, but it had to give way, though most reluctantly, to the ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... or not. But first let me make it plain that I am not assuming that all the great monuments of human genius are literary. I am not forgetful of the fact that literature is only one of the fine arts, that the Strassburg Cathedral, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Rembrandt's School of Anatomy, Michelangelo's Moses are all products of man's creative genius, records of the life of God in the soul of man. But I do insist that literature is the most inclusive and ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Continental hats, the advancing army showing faintly in the background. How gorgeously they are arrayed! We will use this frame for the excellent, large copy you have of 'The Doctor' and the pictured faces of the German composers—Beethoven, Wagner, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Schubert and Mozart, which I have on a card with a shaded brown background, will exactly fit into this plain frame of narrow molding, from which I have just removed the old cardboard motto, 'No place like home,' done with green-shaded ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... known by his work. You stand in front of some great picture, or you listen to some great symphony, or you read some great book, and you say, 'This is the glory of Raphael, Beethoven, Shakespeare.' Christ points to His saints, and He says, 'Behold My handiwork! Ye are my witnesses. This is what I ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered, so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And alike in the music of the words and sentences ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... reply,—her hands had unconsciously wandered into the mazes of a rich Beethoven voluntary, and the notes, firm, grand, and harmonious, rolled out in the silence with a warm deep tenderness that thrilled the air as with a rhythmic beat of angels' wings. Lost in thought, she scarcely knew what she ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... one always heard the best singers and players of the season, and Epicurus' soul could rest in peace, for her chef had an international reputation. Oh, remember, you music-fed ascetic, many, aye, very many, regard the transition from Tschaikowsky to terrapin, from Beethoven to burgundy with hearts aflame with anticipatory joy—and ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... Beethoven? He was one of the greatest musical composers that ever lived. His great, his sole delight was in music. It was the passion of his life. When all his time and all his mind were given to music, he ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... ramified and delicately minute channels of expression which he has found or framed:—does it follow that this his personal presence (as it may be called) can forthwith be transferred to every other language under the sun? Then may we reasonably maintain that Beethoven's piano music is not really beautiful, because it cannot be played on the hurdy-gurdy. Were not this astonishing doctrine maintained by persons far superior to the writer whom I have selected for ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... 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 every ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... supposed by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars" of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and Goethe and Schiller, and was not ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... find Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, even on the piano, extraordinarily satisfying and refreshing to the mind after the strain of looking at English scenery." He drank a long draught ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... the program for one number. My selection might have appeared at that particular time as a bit of affectation, but I considered it deeply appropriate; I played Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique." When I sat down at the piano and glanced into the faces of the several hundreds of people who were there solely on account of love or sympathy for me, emotions swelled in my heart which enabled me to play the "Pathetique" as I could ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... early to see the sights. There were not quite so many sights to be seen then as there are today. The Art Museum had not got much above its foundations; the new Trinity Church was still in the future; but the big organ and the bronze statue of Beethoven were in their glory, and every day at high noon a small straggling audience wandered into Music Hall to hear the instrument played. To this extempore concert Katy was taken, and to Faneuil Hall and the ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... thought towards which my personal tendencies most attracted me. German I continued to read with a master, and music, under the marvellously able teaching of Mr. John Farmer, musical director of Harrow School, took up much of my time. My dear mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven and Bach were her favourite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of Beethoven's that I did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did not master. Mendelssohn's "Lieder" gave a lighter recreation, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Wieck, on September 13, 1819, took place at Leipsic. That city had not yet entered upon the period of musical greatness that it was soon to enjoy. The day of Beethoven and Schubert was apparently passing, and only the lighter and more trivial styles of composition held sway. Her father, however, Friedrich Wieck, was a piano teacher of extensive reputation and most excellent qualities, and did his best to raise the standard of the place. From him, and from her ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... listened to a Brahms symphony that pleased him even more than had "The New World," and when, two weeks later, he heard the Tschaikowski "Pathetique" and later the "Unfinished" symphony, by Schubert, and a Beethoven symphony, attracted by each in turn, he realized that his prejudice against the whole question of symphonic music had been both wrongly conceived ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... her father 'was strongly suspected of suicide.' He was said to have resembled more his maternal grandfather than any of his father's family. The daughter of Moliere was like her father in her wit and humor. Beethoven had for a maternal grandmother an excellent musician. The mother of Mozart gave the first lessons to her son. A crowd of composers have descended from John Sebastian Bach, who long stood unrivaled as a performer on the organ, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... songs of exaltation, such as Beethoven's "Nature's Adoration." Character songs, in which the singer assumes a character and expresses its sentiments. A good example of this is "The Poet's Love" cycle by Schumann. Classifying the song in this way is the first step toward discovering ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... which 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 PARRY'S ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... she wanted company she let these juveniles cluster round her in her garden rambles; but in a general way she preferred loneliness, and to work at the cracked old piano in the room where she slept. Beethoven and Chopin, Mozart and Mendelssohn were companions of whom she ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... who wearies With tales of countless cures, His teeth, I've enacted, Shall all be extracted By terrified amateurs: The music-hall singer attends a series Of masses and fugues and "ops" By Bach, interwoven With Spohr and Beethoven, At classical Monday Pops: The billiard sharp whom any one catches His doom's extremely hard - He's made to dwell In a dungeon cell On a spot that's always barred; And there he plays extravagant matches In fitless finger-stalls, On ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... gate of Pendlemere Abbey. A small figure hopped from it, and the chauffeur handed out a bicycle, then drove away at full speed. Girl and bicycle crept through the laurels to the side door, whence the former fled upstairs like a whirlwind. From the intermediates' room came the strains of the Beethoven sonata with which Loveday was at present wrestling. Diana, wrenching off coat and hat in her ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... be encored than to receive the thanks of your hearers, not so much in gratitude for what you have given them, but in relief that you have left off. You should try to suit your music, like your conversation, to your company. A solo of Beethoven's would be as much out of place in some circles as a comic song at a quakers' meeting. To those who only care for the light popularities of the season, give Balfe and Verdi, Glover and Julien. To connoisseurs, if you perform well enough ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... a frail bubble ascending through the still atmosphere of a June day. The perfect roundness of her limbs formed suave and enchanting curves. It was like listening to the most spiritual symphony of Beethoven the divine, to watch the harmonious flow of lines. This, indeed was a pleasure cheaply purchased at any price. What cared I if I had waded to the portal of this wonder through another's blood. I would have given my own to enjoy one ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... whispering leaves and gloom, I saw, too dark, too dumb for bronze or stone, One tragic head that bowed against the sky; O, in a hush too deep for any tomb I saw Beethoven, dreadfully alone With his own grief, and ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... too great a person to be "Mistered." Fancy Mr. Beethoven, or Mr. Paderewski! Joyselle the Great and Glorious would help him. The mater appeared to like him. It was strange, for she had been in a terrible rage the first day or two—but she certainly was as pleased ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... systems of notation, the Troubadours and Minnesingers, counterpoint and fugue, beginnings of opera, the clavecinists, beginnings of programme music, harmony, beginnings of the modern orchestra, evolution of forms, the symphony and opera up to Beethoven." A second course (this was not begun until the following year) treated "of the development of forms, the song, romanticism, instrumental development, and the composers for pianoforte, revolutionary ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... And, alarmed, she had drawn back. Perhaps it was the Teutonic blood in him—a grandmother of a German house. And, yet, who could say, perhaps this piece of consuming idealism was from that ancient extinct Germany of Beethoven. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... warned by palsy of the approach of death, and struggling with distress and suffering, he sat down to compose the great works which have made his name immortal in music. Mozart composed his great operas, and last of all his "Requiem," when oppressed by debt and struggling with a fatal disease. Beethoven produced his greatest works amidst gloomy sorrow, when oppressed by almost ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... live in them: I have a palace on the grand canal. I find modern clothes prosaic. I dont wear them, except, of course, in the street. My ears are offended by the Cockney twang: I keep out of hearing of it and speak and listen to Italian. I find Beethoven's music coarse and restless, and Wagner's senseless and detestable. I do not listen to them. I listen to Cimarosa, to Pergolesi, to Gluck and Mozart. ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... book-room, where, staring into the playing flames, he could fall at peace into the almost motionless reverie which he seemed merely to harass and weary himself by trying to disperse. She opened the little piano at the far end of the room and played on and on as fancy led—Chopin and Beethoven, a fugue from Bach, and lovely forlorn old English airs, till the music seemed not only a voice persuading, pondering, and lamenting, but gathered about itself the hollow surge of the water and the darkness; wistful and clear, as the thoughts ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... monster the Father of Christ? Is he the God who inspireth Buddha and Shakespeare and Beethoven and Darwin and Plato? No, not he. But in warfare and massacre, in rapine and rape, in black revenge and in deadly malice, in slavery and polygamy, and the debasement of women, and in the pomps, vanities and greeds of royalty, of clericalism, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... good taste. The origin of synagogue melodies was attributed to remoter and remoter periods; the most soulful hymns were adapted to frivolous airs. Later still, at a time when German music had risen to its zenith, when Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven flourished, the Jewish strolling musician Klesmer, a mendicant in the world of song as in the world of finance, was wandering through the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... ninety, he was Dominique Ingres to the last, undertaking new works with the enthusiasm and vitality of Titian. A few days before his death he gave a musical party, favourite works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven being performed by skilled amateurs. His funeral was a veritable apotheosis, disciples, admirers and detractors swelling the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... feminine, and the inquiry is made whether all the best love-poetry in existence (except, perhaps, the "Sonnets from the Portuguese") has not been written by men; whether the song which embodies the ideal of pure and tender passion—Adelaida—was written by Frau Beethoven; whether it was the Fornarina, or Raphael, who painted the Sistine Madonna. Nay, we have known one such heretic go so far as to lay his hands upon the ark itself, so to speak, and to defend the startling ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Street, Baltimore, when he wrote the words of the Centennial Cantata, which he said he "tried to make as simple and candid as a melody of Beethoven." He wrote to a friend that he was not disturbed because a paper had said that the poem of the Cantata was like a "communication from the spirit of Nat Lee through a Bedlamite medium." It was "but a little ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... up, and was wondering how on earth they were to get through the evening. Various dreadful possibilities occurred to him; music (Miss Tancred and Beethoven on the grand piano); family prayers; cards; in some places they sat up half the night playing whist, a game that bored him to extinction. Thank heaven, as there were but three of them, it would not be whist. Meanwhile it was past eight ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... of pianola music includes everything from Bach to Richard Strauss it seemed to me that it would be easy to give the reader a course in musical development, beginning with the simpler pieces of Bach, like the bourrees and gavottes; then taking up the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven; the compositions of the romantic school from Schubert to Chopin; and ending with the modern school of Wagner, Liszt and Richard Strauss—in other words giving a survey of ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... Lancelot saw Mary Ann he did not remember having seen her before. This time she was a biped, and wore a white cap. Besides, he hardly glanced at her. He was in a bad temper, and Beethoven was barking terribly at the intruder who stood quaking in the doorway, so that the crockery clattered on the tea-tray she bore. With a smothered oath Lancelot caught up the fiery little spaniel and rammed him into the pocket of his dressing-gown, ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... oft there grows a painful thorn the floweret's stalk upon: Behind each cupboard's gilded doors there lurks a Skeleton: The crumpled roseleaf mocks repose, beneath the bed of down: In proof of which attend the tale of Bach Beethoven Brown. ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... has been wanting in great woman writers, though there have been few of them. I look eventually to see woman physicists as eminent as Helmholtz and Kelvin, woman painters as great as Raphael and Velasquez, woman musicians as able as Bach and Beethoven. That we have had none yet I believe to be solely the fault of inadequate education. Of this inadequacy our imitative, arbitrary and uninspiring club programmes are a part—the very fact that our clubwomen pin their faith to programmes of any kind is a consequence ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... and he carried the Tenor along with him from one occupation to another with distracting glee. When he was tired of making music, as he called it, he demanded food, and, so long as he could cook it and serve it himself, he delighted in bacon and eggs, as much as he did in Bach and Beethoven. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... her fingers in a flourish over the keys. "What shall it be? How shall we capture them, those passionate hearts? That first fine careless rapture? Poetry itself." She gazed softly into the garden a moment, and presently, with a shake of her body, began to play the opening bars of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. The piano was old and woolly. She played without music. The lamplight was rather dim. The moonbeams from the window lay across the keys. Her head was in shadow. And whether it was simply due to her personality or to some really occult skill in her playing I cannot ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... Dog's Tale Abhorred extortion and visible waste. After seventy we are respected—but don't need to behave American public opinion is a delicate fabric Asked forgiveness for the tears he had brought into her life Back Number Beethoven's Fifth Symphony Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies also moved him deeply Bible Blasphemy Cavalleria Rusticana Classic—something that everybody wants to have read Convenient bronchitis Count among my ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger
... to the same rule. Such of them as nourish the body are good,—good even to the point of being indispensable; but as we make a difference between the barnyard fowl and the nightingale, and between the common run of humanity and a Beethoven or a Milton, so maize and potatoes are never put into the same category with lilies and violets. It must be so, because man is more than an animal, and "the life ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... saw-mill by an accident, and you mention that he lost an arm there, too. And yet in the nineteenth chapter you say, 'Adolph rushed up to Mary, threw his arms about her, and clasped her to his bosom;' and then you go on to relate how he sat down at the piano in the soft moonlight and played one of Beethoven's sonatas 'with sweet poetic fervor.' Now, the thing, you see, don't dovetail. Adolph couldn't possibly throw his arms around Mary if one was buried in the field of battle and the other was minced up in a saw-mill, and he couldn't ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... laughed at this purity and fraternity! His eyes were good and Concha, for her part, was no model of prudence in hiding her feelings. Monteverde was her lover, just as formerly a musician had been, at a period when the countess talked of nothing but Beethoven and Wagner, as if they were callers, and long before that a pretty little duke, who gave private amateur bull-fights at which he slaughtered the innocent oxen after greeting lovingly the Alberca woman, who, wrapped in a white mantilla, and decorated with pinks, leaned out of the box in ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... nice, polite young man. When I made a mistake yesterday he said: 'Pray, mademoiselle, why do you take so much pains to improve upon Beethoven?'" ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... is, in the words of Todhunter, "to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation of the genius of humanity, chained and suffering under the tyranny of the evil principle which at present rules over the world, typified in Jupiter; the name Prometheus, FORESIGHT, connecting ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... that child, father, for she is getting entirely beyond my control. If I attempt to make her study she writes poetry instead of her exercises, draws caricatures instead of sketching properly, and bewilders her music teacher by asking questions about Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as if they were personal friends of his. If I beg her to take exercise, she rides like an Amazon all over the Island, grubs in the garden as if for her living, or goes paddling about the bay till I'm distracted lest the tide should carry her ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... better than he knew them himself, and she understood that the song he was weaving with voice and lute would be worthy of him, as it is; for in the growth of music, the fine art, his masterpiece of oratorio are left behind and forgotten, being too thin and primitive for an age that began with Beethoven and ended in Richard Wagner; but his songs have not lost their hold on those simpler natures that are still responsive to a melody and vibrate to a ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... curious old furniture, his mended crockery, and his engravings, yellow with age, the frames of which had turned red; like the old Erard piano, upon which Louise, an accomplished performer, now was playing a set of Beethoven's waltzes and Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words." This poor old servant now had only the shrill, trembling tones of ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... See Paul Morillot's essay on Berlioz ecrivain, 1903, Grenoble.] One would think that such an imaginative and skilful writer, accustomed in his profession of critic to express every shade of feeling, would be able to tell us more exactly his ideas of art than a Beethoven or a Mozart. But it is not so. As too much light may blind the vision, so too much intellect may hinder the understanding. Berlioz's mind spent itself in details; it reflected light from too many facets, and did not focus itself in one strong beam which would have ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... excuse my asking the question," I went on, "but the fact is I've never seen a Steinbech before. I thought perhaps that different makers adopted different arrangements of the notes, as makers of typewriters do. Now, will this piano play Beethoven? I particularly want a piano that will play the 'Moonlight' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... not for nothing that I have seen the sun lifting up the faces of the flowers, and crumbling the countenances of the hills. And I have seen music stirring faintly in the bones of old men. And I have heard the dead Beethoven singing in the feet ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Carriages belonging to Amarendra Babu's friends, and some hired ones full of invited guests, brought up the rear. When a start was made, the little police force hustled vehicles out of the way and even stopped tram-cars when necessary; while the band tortured selections from Handel and Beethoven to the intense delight of passers-by, many of whom paused to criticise shortcomings in the procession among themselves. In about an hour it reached its destination, where Kumodini Babu's uncle received the guests. The family barber ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... indicative of psychical atavism, and is an unmistakable evidence of degeneration. Lombroso gives a long list of the men of genius who were celibates. I will mention a few of those with whom the English-speaking world is most familiar: Kant, Newton, Pitt, Fox, Beethoven, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Gray, Dalton, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Lamb, Bentham, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Reynolds, Handel, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Schopenhauer, Camoens, and Voltaire. La Bruyere says of men ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... name of the National Commission, directed by Congress to provide for the dedication ceremonies, I extend to you all a cordial welcome, and as responsive to this inspiring scene of peace and generous feeling, I call upon the chorus to favor us with Beethoven's Creation hymn. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... and the internal consumption is apparently as great as ever: there is now-a-days no Mozart or Haydn to supply imperishable fabrics for the markets of the world; but the orchestras are as good as ever. The Sinfonia-Eroica of Beethoven catching my eye in a programme, I failed not to renew my homage to this prince of sweet and glorious sounds, and was loyally indignant on hearing a fellow-countryman say, that, though rich in harmony, he was poor in melody. ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... and awful as this sympathy, so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it might seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or the great god Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand still with his shout. What is Beethoven's "Funeral March for the Death of a Hero" to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the telegraph of that April morning played on the ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell |
