"Nocturne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elastic and pliable and changes its character with the emotional intensity of the dramatic situation, being more subdued in parts of the first act, asserting itself whenever rage, irony, tenderness, or other emotion call for expression; omnipotent in the great love-duet, culminating in the nocturne, and once more soaring in highest ecstasy in Isolde's dissolution, with endless gradations in the portions between. Hearers who are not accustomed to the dramatic expression of music attend only to those moments of intense lyric expression, just as in the opera they attend only to the arias; ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight |
