"Beethoven" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... England, he never wished to see it again; the memories which it would arouse would be too bitter.... The shade of Beethoven touched him as it passed; Mozart, Mendelssohn, Chopin. But he was thinking only of his loneliness, and the marvelous touch of the hands which evoked the great spirits was lost ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... eyes', gave Milton five pounds for 'Paradise Lost', kept Samuel Johnson cooling his heels on Lord Chesterfield's doorstep, reviled Shelley as an unclean dog, killed Keats, cracked jokes on Glueck, Schubert, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner, and committed so many other impious follies and stupidities that a thousand letters like this could not suffice even to catalogue ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... a 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 ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Mary," he said, "give us some music, now the urn has gone away. Play me that beautiful air of Beethoven, the one I call 'The ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... more solemn key, and once more talked off the words. He left you with a slight feeling of anxiety. You began to be afraid that the little girl would fall out of the trees and hurt herself. But no, instead he grabbed something by the hair right out of a Beethoven adagio, and began to want that little girl with the blue eyes as a little girl with blue eyes has seldom been wanted before; she became Psyche, Trojan Helen, a lover's dream; all that is most exquisite and to be desired in the world—and then suddenly he lost all ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... question speedily. "I'll take Rags and run up the beach to our bungalow and bring them to you, if Phyllis will lend me her slickers," she declared. "No, you mustn't come with me, Ted. I'll be perfectly safe with Rags, and while I'm gone, you can all be giving that Beethoven sonata that you promised Aunt Marcia. I won't be ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... hard as his pupil to maintain his reserve of instruction. Mark took long walks with Richard Ford when Richard was home in his vacations, and long walks by himself when Richard was at Cooper's Hill. He often went to Wychford Rectory, where he learnt to enjoy Schumann and Beethoven and Bach ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... elegant little book of dilettante criticism, "A Ramble among the Musicians in Germany." He latterly contributed to the "Musical Times" a whole series of masterly essays and analyses upon the Masses of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But the work upon which his reputation will rest was a "Life of Mozart," which was purchased ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... beforehand what he wanted to sing. (I might have spared myself the trouble.) He went toward the piano, but before he sang he took out of the mysterious basket an egg, which he broke and swallowed raw, to clear his voice. He began at the first song on the list, "Adeleide" (Beethoven), and sang that and one after another of those on the list. It seemed queer to have the roles reversed in this way. I generally sang for royalty, but here royalty was singing ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... consideration of the public. In St. George's Church there is an organ which may be placed in the "h c" category. It is a splendid instrument—can't be equalled in this part of the country for either finery or music—and is played by a gentleman whose name ranks in St. George's anthem book, with those of Beethoven, Handel, and Mozart. We have heard excellent music sung and played at St. George's; but matters would be improved if the efforts of the choir were seconded. At present the singers have some time been ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... them music is a language. Says Mayhew, in his elaborate work on the Rhine, in speaking of the free education in music in Germany: "To tickle the gustatory nerves with either dainty food or drink costs some money; but to be able to reproduce the harmonious combinations of a Beethoven or a Weber, or to make the air tremble melodiously with some sweet and simple ballad, or even to recall the sonorous solemnities of some prayerful chorus or fine thanksgiving in an oratorio, is not only to fill the heart and brain with affections ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... the young people of our happy century, has been accustomed, for three or four consecutive years, to press her fingers on the keys of a piano, a long-suffering instrument. She has hammered out Beethoven, warbled the airs of Rossini and run through the exercises of Crammer. I had already taken pains to convince her of the excellence of music; to attain this end, I have applauded her, I have listened without yawning to the most tiresome sonatas in the world, and I have at last consented ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... good music—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—and were almost priggish in their contempt for anything of a lighter kind; especially with a lightness English or French! It was only the musical lightness of Germany they could endure at all! But whether in Paris or London, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... as we can know anything, that there is music and supermusic. Rubinstein wrote music; Beethoven wrote supermusic (Mr. Finck may contradict this statement). Bellini wrote operas; Mozart wrote superoperas. Jensen wrote songs; Schubert wrote supersongs. The superiority of Voi che sapete as a vocal melody over Ah! non giunge ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... justly so. At her receptions 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 Mrs. ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... sweet sunset almost overpast. Kindly and calm, patrician to the last, Superbly falls her gown of sober gray, And on her chignon's elegant array The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste. She talks BEETHOVEN; frowns disapprobation At BALZAC'S name, sighs it at 'poor GEORGE SAND'S'; Knows that she has exceeding pretty hands; Speaks Latin with a right accentuation; And gives at need (as one who ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... say, not the rule, but the discovery of the rule, men whose intuitive perception led them to the right practice. We cannot imagine Homer to have studied rules, and the infant genius of those giants of their art, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven, who composed at the ages of seven, five, and ten, must certainly have been unfettered by them: to the less brilliantly endowed, however, they have a use as being compendious safeguards against error. Let me then lay down as the best of all rules for writing, "forgetfulness ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... posthumous is probably the result of his exceeding simplicity and diffidence, for he always shrank from popular applause; therefore we may believe his compositions were not placed in the proper light during his life. It was through Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, that the musical world learned what a master-spirit had wrought in the person of John Sebastian Bach. The first time Mozart heard one of Bach's hymns, he said, "Thank God! I learn something absolutely new." Bach's great compositions include his "Preludes and Fugues" ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... 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
... 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
... aiming at instruction than at pleasure, and the Wisdom which comes through Pleasure:—within each book the pieces have therefore been arranged in gradations of feeling or subject. The development of the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven has been here thought of as a model, and nothing placed without careful consideration. And it is hoped that the contents of this Anthology will thus be found to present a certain unity, "as episodes," in the noble ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... mentioned above it is significant that so little has been attempted in the way of alteration or improvement, and it is still more so that of that little such a small proportion is worthy of a second thought. As Bach stands in relation to the fugue, as Beethoven to the symphony and Stradivari to the violin, so is Tourte to the bow. Superior alike to his predecessors and successors, he stands high poised upon the ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... Mischa Elman, Harry Lauder, Sousa, Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms, Grieg, Moszkowsky, the "latest song hit" from anything you please. Ask and you will find along this thoroughfare. There are no more prosperous looking bazaars on this street than those consecrated to the sale of "musical phonographs" ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... Music risky? Bach? Beethoven! No, I don't agree. On the contrary, I think it is most elevating—most morally inspiring. No, I tremble before it because it is so ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... musicians and the great painters live in their work in a singularly vivid sense. Music and painting are more direct in popular appeal than great poetry. Yet none can ridicule the sentiment which is embodied in the statue of Beethoven at Bonn, or in that of Paolo Veronese at Verona. To accept literally the youthful judgment of Milton and his imitators is to condemn sentiments and practices which are in universal vogue among civilised peoples. It is to deny to the Poets' ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... 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 ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... welfare of his fellow, if he did not believe in a future life, in that proportion is he wanting in the genuine feelings of justice and benevolence; as the musician who would care less to play a sonata of Beethoven's finely in solitude than in public, where he was to be paid for it, is wanting in ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... days of "long, long ago" when as a little chap in my native Bonn, I had first listened with interest to the charming voices of the golden-haired daughters of old Albion who came in large numbers to reside in the famous Beethoven-town. ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... delight or disappointment, or else lay motionless, plunged in the same kind of ecstatic reverie which enthusiastic admirers of classical music yield themselves up to while listening to one of the great Beethoven's divine sonatas. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... greatest beauty—Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone Park, Niagara Falls, may pass before your vision; you may climb the lofty Alpine summit and behold the snow-streaked and snow-capped peaks towering to the heavens around you—or you may listen to the best music ever composed by a Mozart, a Handel, or a Beethoven, or the finest ever executed by a Liszt, a Rubenstein, or a Paderewski; yet I must tell you upon the authority of God's word that "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... anything. Among other things, he could play splendidly on the violin—an instrument which he styled a fiddle, and which MacSweenie called a "fuddle." His repertoire was neither extensive nor select. If you had asked for something of Beethoven or Mozart he would have opened his eyes, perhaps also his mouth. But at a Strathspey or the Reel o' Tulloch he was almost equal to Neil Gow himself—so admirable were his tune and time. In a lonesome land, where amusements are few and the nights long, the power to "fuddle" counts ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... and highly-wrought comparison of the early lives of Turner and Giorgione, and of the different circumstances under which their art-minds severally dawned and developed. The remainder of the book is almost wholly devoted in glowing strains, like the pompous glory of the crowning movement of a Beethoven symphony, to loving yet deferential homage to Turner. His works and life are traced out and lingered over, not with biographical exactness, but with some effort to make them explicable of the character of the great painter. 'Much of his mind and heart I do not know—perhaps ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... Quilter-Beckett, who sits at a table grim with knobs, buttons, dial-faces, in a cabinet near a saloon where Hogarth, Loveday, and five lieutenants are lunching; and where he sits he can hear the band in an alcove rendering for the eaters Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: hear, not heed: for two gunners in each casemate have sighted a ship through pivoted glasses, whose fixing, disturbing an electrical circuit, prints the ship's distance on an indicator ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... world faded away and grew to seem worthless and unmeaning. Only the soft golden voice remained and the grey hard voice that said, 'You've got to look after Philip, you know!' And the two voices together made a harmony more beautiful than you will find in any of Beethoven's sonatas. Because Lucy knew that she should follow the grey voice, and remember the golden voice as long as ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are discoveries in God, but so are the advances in knowledge made by Plato, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Edison. He shows Himself through Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul, but also through Homer, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Darwin, George Eliot, William James, and Henry Irving. I take the names at random as illustrating different branches of endeavour, and if I use only great ones it is not that the lesser are excluded. No one department of human effort is specially His, or is His special expression. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... culture. She was passionately devoted to music, which inspired some of her best poems; and during the last years of her life, in hours of intense physical suffering, she found relief and consolation in listening to the strains of Bach and Beethoven. When she went abroad, painting was revealed to her, and she threw herself with the same ardor and enthusiasm into the study of the great masters; her last work (left unfinished) was a critical analysis of the genius and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... can never be made to understand the glories of sunrise, or the light upon the far-off mountains; just as a deaf man may read books about acoustics, but they will not give him a notion of what it is to hear Beethoven, so we must have love to Christ before we know what love to Christ is, and we must consciously experience the love of Christ ere we know what the love of Christ is. We must have love to Christ in order to have a deep and living possession ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... Humaine. In art, Sir Henry Raeburn, William Blake, Flaxman, Canova, Thorwaldsen, Crome, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Constable, Sir David Wilkie, and Turner were in the exercise of their happiest faculties: as were, in the usage of theirs, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Spohr, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... passing through Bonn, on his homeward journey, that Haydn met Beethoven, and praised the composition which the young assistant Hof-organist submitted to him.[10] The reception accorded to the composer on his arrival at Vienna was in every way worthy of the fame which his London visit had added to his reputation, and every one was anxious ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... the earth at sunrise, and that the birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We recall the fact that it isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get this—if it ever comes to us—and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he heard his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... 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 ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... the long leaves lean out as if to touch her neck. The great white and red roses of the d'aubusson carpet are spread enigmatically about her feline feet; a grand piano leans its melodious mouth to her; and there she sits when her visitors have left her, playing Beethoven's sonatas in the dreamy firelight. The spring-tide shows but a bloom of unvarying freshness; August has languished and loved in the strength of the sun. She is stately, she is tall. What sins, what disappointments, what ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and turned towards her a moment. "Possibly not a very high order of art," he said; "a little too 'easy,' perhaps, like the Bougereau, but 'Consolation' should appeal very simply and directly, after all. Do you care for Beethoven?" ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... engagement of the whole forces of their mind; and the changing views which accompany the growth of their experience are marked by still more sweeping alterations in the manner of their art. So that criticism loves to dwell upon and distinguish the varying periods of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upwards from the Delphic caves of human life, he will know that the rapture of life (or any thing which by approach can merit that name) does not arise, unless as perfect music arises—music of Mozart or Beethoven—by the confluence of the mighty and terrific discords with the subtle concords. Not by contrast, or as reciprocal foils do these elements act, which is the feeble conception of many, but by union. They are the sexual ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... enter, not only into the spirit of their text, but even into the slightest shade, the minutest detail of it, so as to make the music, as it were, a translation of their words into a higher kind of language. What, on the other hand, is possible or impossible for the voice is, since the time of Beethoven, but rarely considered; many composers, even the most distinguished ones, having evidently little knowledge of the most beautiful of instruments, for which they are nevertheless ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... vibration of each one fibre giving rise, it is believed, to the sensation of one particular tone, and combinations of such vibrations producing chords. It is by the action of this complex organ then, that all the wonderful intricacy and beauty of Beethoven and Mozart come, most probably, ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... of Beethoven, experienced by you on duty in the drawing room, it would be curious to know whether it was really something greater than Beethoven had any idea of. You sat and listened, and tried to fix a passage in your mind ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... belief that the mistake made by the managers of the symphony concert in Central Music Hall night before last was in not opening the concert with Beethoven's "Eroica," instead of making it the last number on the programme. We incline to the opinion, however, that, in putting the symphony last, the managers complied with the very first requirement of dramatic composition. This requirement is to the effect ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... unspeakable monster, Jahweh, the Father of Christ? Is he the God who inspired Buddha, and Shakespeare, and Herschel, and Beethoven, and Darwin, and Plato, and Bach? No; not he. But in warfare and massacre, in rapine and in rape, in black revenge and deadly malice, in slavery, and polygamy, and the debasement of women; and in ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... a fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies. And at the Music Hall Frederick Lamond was playing Beethoven. How his strong hands would beat out the music! Oh, as to the beauty of the world ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... fixed now to one refrain—"I must have my freedom." Freedom, at that moment, had a mocking, lovely face, the darkest blue eyes, and quantities of long, black hair. She wore a violet dress, her hands were white, and she talked like a Blue Book set to music by Beethoven. Yes, he must ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... intimate with some few families, drop in and set the young ladies down to play Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and it is a nice ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... glades. She missed Adriana very much, and for a few days always expected her to enter the room when the door opened; and then she sighed, and then she flew to her easel, or buried herself in some sublime cantata of her favourite master, Beethoven. Then came the most wonderful performance of the whole day, and that was the letter, never missed, to Adriana. Considering that she lived in solitude, and in a spot with which her daughter was quite familiar, it was really marvellous that the mother should every day be able ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... again to his wife, "health and spirits good, but with a soft touch of melancholy, a little homesickness, a longing for deep woods and lakes, for a desert, for yourself and the children, and all this mixed up with a sunset and Beethoven." ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... who were gifted with the lyrical temperament and powers of expression in poetry and music in corresponding measure to Giorgione in painting. It would show want of critical acumen to expect from Keats the consistency of Milton, or that Schubert should keep the unvarying high level of Beethoven, and it is equally unreasonable to exact from Giorgione the uniform excellence which characterises Titian. I do not propose at this point to work out the comparison between the painter, the musician, and the poet; ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... the pianoforte players by whom I have heard Beethoven's music more or less successfully rendered, Charles Halle has always appeared to me the one who most perfectly communicated the mind and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... its beauty or demand that beauty from the artist. When they themselves become like little children, then they see that the greatest artists, in all their seeming triumphs, are like little children too. For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it is not the arrogant, the accomplished, the magnificent, that moves us. They are great men to us; but they achieved beauty because in their effort to achieve it they were little children to themselves. They impose awe on us, ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Yet even I (and none will bow 30 Deeper to these) must needs allow, They yield us not, to soothe our pains, Such multitude of heavenly strains As from the kings of sound are blown, Mozart, deg. Beethoven, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... to promise," said the Colonel, addressing Honoria in an under voice, "that Darrell should hear you play Beethoven." ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... will be placed permanently in the Civic Auditorium, the two most important musical items found on the schedule of Exposition enterprises are the engagements of Camille Saint-Saens and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The former, who maintained that "Beethoven is the greatest, the only real, artist, because he upheld the idea of universal brotherhood," is perhaps better fitted than any living composer to write special music for the Exposition. This he has done,—writing two compositions in fact; and ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... 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 Jew"; Make answer—Beethoven could scarcely do more— That the man who ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... Antonino, which Leo X. had almost promised the brethren of S. Marco on his triumphant entry in 1515. The work, if it had been painted in the larger form, would have been a perfect masterpiece of composition, "a very Beethoven symphony in colour," if we may judge from the sketch at Panshanger, where a living crowd groups round the bier of the archbishop, and life, earnestness, harmony, ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... in music. He was a good performer on the piano, and could get such full harmonies out of the organ that stood in one corner of his entrance room at Little Grange as did good to the listener. Sometimes it would be a bit from one of Mozart's Masses, or from one of the finales of some one of his or Beethoven's Operas. And then at times he would fill up the harmonies with his voice, true and resonant almost to the last. I have heard him say, "Did you never observe how an Italian organ-grinder will sometimes put in a few notes of his own in such perfect keeping with the air which he was grinding?" He was ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... America has yet contributed to literature. Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age, might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Moliere; his surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the sardonic bull-fiddling ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... 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 ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... dignity of processional bas-relief. And in the case of all these creative critics of art it is evident that personality is an absolute essential for any real interpretation. When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely—Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality. When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience. His ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... 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 statue, has no secrets but open secrets. You stand before it, and the very soul and essence of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... soul and body, and finally came to the wise conclusion that everyone who loved music was not a composer. Returning from one of Mozart's grand operas, splendidly performed at the Royal Theatre, he looked over his own, played a few of the best parts, sat staring at the busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly he tore up his music sheets, one by one, and as the last fluttered out of his hand, he said ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Kew only sang a few bars of Beethoven in a small voice. He was rather sad, because of Jay. He had not realised till he came home how very thoroughly Jay had disappeared. He led the conversation to Jay. It often happened that Kew led conversations, because conversations, like the public, generally ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... from Mrs. Carnaby, that you are back in town. Could you spare us tomorrow evening? It would be so nice of you. The quartet will give Beethoven's F minor, and Alma says it will be well done—the conceit of the child! We hope to have some interesting people What a shocking affair of poor Mrs. Carnaby's! I never knew anything quite ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... be so; it may be that the Germany of Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven has been absorbed by the Germany of Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon; but it must not be forgotten at the same time that, since their day, yet another Germany has come into being, the Germany of Marx, Engels, and Bebel, a Germany which is represented ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... often made with a genius between the "man" and the "artist" has been justly ridiculed by Wagner himself. For the truest individuality of an artist is in his art, not when he leaves his own proper sphere and enters one that is foreign to him. Beethoven is the writer of symphonies and sonatas, not the suspicious friend and unmannerly plebeian. The man is the same in both relations, i.e. his character remains the same, only it manifests itself differently under changed ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... composers?" I said, pointing to sheet music by Weber, Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Hrold, Wagner, Auber, Gounod, Victor Mass, and a number of others scattered over a full size piano-organ, which occupied one of the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it. Whether you are like Mrs. Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come—of course, not so as to disturb the others—; or like ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... other arts than that of painting. The art of music is most germane to the Austrian spirit; and we have a ready key to the peculiarities of the Austrian disposition in the difference between Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss, on the one hand, and Haendel, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner on the other. Moreover, the Austrians are in all respects conservative, in literary taste no less than in politics and religion. The pseudo-classicism of Gottsched maintained its authority in Austria not merely after the time of Lessing, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... with English phrases like "rare technique," "vonderful touch," "bee-youtiful tone," or "poeytic temperament." She assured me that her son was the youngest boy in the United States to play Brahms and Beethoven successfully. At first I thought that she was prattling these words parrot fashion, but I soon realized that, to a considerable extent, at ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... regard the opera as one of the great civilizers. No one can listen to the symphonies of Beethoven, or the music of Schubert, without receiving a benefit. And no one can hear the operas of Wagner without feeling that he has ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 whole evolution ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... 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 before the blazing fire. ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... able even to have a bath, or go to the Italian Opera, two things that are more necessary to him than bread. His works abound in references to his beloved art, and when he was writing "Massimilla Doni" he employed a professional musician to instruct him about it. Beethoven, in particular, he speaks of with the utmost enthusiasm, and after hearing his "Symphony in Ut mineur," he says that the great musician is the only person who makes him feel jealous, and that he prefers him even to Rossini and Mozart. "The spirit of the ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... musicians were Germans, but Lanier was an American and a Southerner, who had graces of manner and goodness of soul. He was a close friend of the Baltimore musicians, such as Madame Falk-Auerbach, a pupil of Rossini's and a teacher in the Conservatory of Music, "a woman who plays Beethoven with the large conception of a man, and yet nurses her children all day with a noble simplicity of devotion such as I have rarely seen," said Lanier. Outside of musical circles he had access to the homes of the most prominent people of Baltimore, in which he frequently played the flute ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... 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
... zither, cornet and trombone, and by 1877 he had already appeared in concert at Danzig. His family was very poor, and his early years were full of difficulties. It is said that, at the age of nine, he copied the whole score of Wagner's Ring, the scores of the nine Beethoven symphonies and the complete works of Mozart. His regular teacher, in those days, was Stadtpfeifer Schmidt, who instructed him in piano and thorough-bass. In 1884, desiring to have lessons in counterpoint from Prof. Kalbsbraten, of Mainz, ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... garden finished, mellow, blooming with such blossoms as were sold in Saint Luke's Market; he had scarcely ever seen flowers growing in the mass. He saw himself reclining in the garden with a rare and beautiful book in his hand, while the sound of Beethoven's music came to him through the open window of the drawing-room. In so far as he saw Maggie at all, he saw her somehow mysteriously elegant and vivacious He did not see his father. His fancy had little relation ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... constantly came more for the doctor. From time to time he turned and signed to De Silvis, as he heard the loved notes of 'unser Schumann,' 'unser Beethoven,' or even ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... thinks the musician's life the highest life. He says those to whom the revelations of God were committed were musicians. As David and Isaiah received inspiration to the strains of the harp, so, he says, have Bach and Mozart, Handel and Haydn, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. And where, indeed," she continued, in a musing tone, half soliloquizing, "where, indeed, can man rise so near heaven as when he listens to the inspired strains of these ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... fiddle?" Rubinstein's playing I never liked. To me he seemed only the most violent of all the piano-bangers of the world; but he was literally worshipped by his admirers, and was grand to look at—as fine as Beethoven must have been.' ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... see what else one can do with one's life, Miss Granger," her companion answered lightly. "Of course, if a man had the genius of a Beethoven, or a Goethe, or a Michael Angelo—or if he were 'a heaven-born general,' like Clive, it would be different; he would have some purpose and motive in his existence. But for the ruck of humanity, what can they do but ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... would hear and taunt her with it later, she knew. But though she scorned the servile and downtrodden Crosby, Sissy, no more than he, dared disobey that grenadier, his mother. She took her seat at the piano, opened a Beethoven that Mrs. Pemberton had given her the last Christmas, under the impression that she was fostering a taste for the classical, and, with a revengeful little hand that couldn't reach the octaves, she began to ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... 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
... writers on musical subjects would have us believe that the love of vocal melody is outgrown by one who reaches the heights of musical development. This may be true; but if so, the world has not yet progressed so far. Music without melody may some day be written. But Mozart knew naught of it, nor Beethoven, nor Wagner. Melody is still beautiful, and never more lovely than when artistically sung by a beautiful voice. We have not reached a point where we can afford to toss lightly aside the old art ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... beheld nothing more than an abstracted frown over the tip-top edge of his paper, I defiantly swung into The Humming Coon, which apparently had no more effect than Herman Lohr. So with malice aforethought I slowly and deliberately pounded out the Beethoven Funeral March. I lost myself, in fact, in that glorious and melodic wail of sorrow, merged my own puny troubles in its god-like immensities, and was brought down to earth by ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... had come over the world that violently affected all processes of thought. And strangely, it was strongest in the land where the great heights of poetry and music had just been reached. Where the high aim of a Beethoven and a Goethe had been proclaimed, arose a Wagner to preach the gospel of brute fate and nature, where love was the involuntary sequence of mechanical device and ended in inevitable death, all overthrowing the heroic idea that teems throughout the classic scores, ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... world." And throwing this mission backwards, he sees in what the outer world calls the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Goths and Huns the proof that the Germans have always stemmed the tide of tyrant domination. But Fichte belonged to the generation of Kant and Beethoven. Hegel, coming a little later, though as non-nationalist as Goethe, and a welcomer of the Napoleonic invasion, yet prophesied that if the Germans were once forced to cast off their inertia, they, "by preserving in their contact with outward things ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... narrow sense! They would hardly say that Handel or Beethoven speaks to a wider audience than Homer or Shakspeare, and certainly no musician or painter or sculptor can hope to delight mankind for as many centuries as a poet. And, then, to think what an idea can accomplish—what Greek ideas ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... with his official duties, and he was forced to be strictly regular and punctual in his arrangements. He was an excellent man, and an intellectual one, delighting in art, poetry, and music, and loving to talk of Shakespeare, Raphael, and Beethoven. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... one recalls the spiritual heritage of Germany: when one thinks of Herder, Schiller and Goethe; Tauler, Luther and Schleiermacher; Froebel, Herbart and Richter; Kant, Fichte and Novalis; Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner; one feels that something of the old German heritage must survive. When the German people find out what has happened to them and why, that heritage surely ought to show in some reaction against ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... concert-tours, was to have extended the fame of the Conservatorium; he was the show pupil of the institution, and, in the coming PRUFUNGEN, was to have distinguished himself, and his master with him, by playing Beethoven's Concerto in ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... is a gentle music, quivering like the voice of a great-grandmother in powdered hair. Mozart, he's the precursory genius—the first who endowed an orchestra with an individual voice; and those two will live mostly because they created Beethoven. Ah, Beethoven! power and strength amidst serene suffering, Michael Angelo at the tomb of the Medici! A heroic logician, a kneader of human brains; for the symphony, with choral accompaniments, was the starting-point of all the great ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... other girls to stay away. You needn't fear being shocked." At the end of the hall was a little partitioned-off room. Few enough personal goods could be taken along, but she had made this place hers, a painting, a battered Shakespeare, the works of Anker, a microplayer. Her tapes ran to Bach, late Beethoven and Strauss, music which could be studied endlessly. She took hold of a stanchion and nodded, all at once ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... astonished. Such power and range of voice; such startling transitions; such endless variety! And withal such boundless enthusiasm and almost incredible endurance! Regarded as pure music, one strain of the hermit thrush is to my mind worth the whole of it; just as a single movement of Beethoven's is better than a world of Liszt transcriptions. But in its own ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... of Beethoven, And the grandmother by in her chair, And the foot of all feet on the sofa Beating ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... himself of unbroken purity, reported to me the words of a foreign artist, that "the world would never be better till men subjected themselves to the same laws they had imposed on women;" that artist, he added, was true to the thought. The same was true of Canova, the same of Beethoven. "Like each other demi-god, they kept themselves free from stain;" and Michael Angelo, looking over here from the loneliness of his century, might meet some eyes that ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... piano cannot have been more than ten feet from the reader's chair; and the strain of reading aloud for an hour against a powerful rendering of the most vigorous compositions of Liszt, Wagner, Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin was a most trying ordeal for voice, brain and nerves. Mr. Pulitzer could apparently enjoy the music and the reading at the same time. Often, when something was played of which he knew the air, ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... not look as if it hurt them to pipe. The world may be too small; but the organ cannot possibly be too large. Malibran, Jenny Lind, or Mrs. Mott usually sings to it of an evening, accompanied by Franz, Schubert, or Mendelssohn; or Beethoven drops in to play one of his symphonies. Sunday nights, Handel performs upon it regularly for a choir composed of Vaughan, Herbert, the minister who chants 'Calm on the listening ear of night,' Madame Guyon, and Sarah Adams. Between their hymns, Robertson preaches a sermon and reads from the liturgy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hear of 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 became deaf—perfectly deaf; so that he never more heard one single note from the loudest ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... the attention of a rustic group to whom you might read from "In Memoriam" in vain. A waistcoat of glaring scarlet will be esteemed by a country bumpkin a garment every way preferable to one of aspect more subdued. A nigger melody will charm many a one who would yawn at Beethoven. You must have rough means to move rough people. The outrageous revival-orator may do good to people to whom Bishop Wilberforce or Dr. Caird might preach to no purpose; and if real good be done, by whatever means, all right-minded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... blood, the Prussian military authorities were not losing for centuries the reputation of the great name of Germany." And suppose it were even a small matter if they had lost only the great name of Germany, that the epoch of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven had covered with glory. But with it they have vilified as well the noble role of the philosopher, of the historian, of the savant, and of the artist. In truth they have betrayed their own gods, and the professions to which they belong can no longer ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... one of Keats's poems," I said, "or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The odour of a rose doesn't come to anything—bring one anywhere. It would be hard to tell what one really gets out of the taste of roast beef. The sound of the surf on the Atlantic doesn't come to anything, but hundreds of people travel a long way and live ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... I asked her whether, if she put it to her conscience, she could honestly say that she had holier feelings and higher thoughts, whether, in fact, she felt herself a better human being on her quiet Sunday, than when she heard a Beethoven Symphony, saw a Shakespeare play, or any other noble work of art. She confessed with embarrassment that she could not say so, but nevertheless arrived at the logical conclusion that, for all that, it was very wicked of the Germans ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... dings 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 Ist ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... 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
... hair sitting in the first row of stalls (most uncomfortable seats) who followed 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
... 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, nay a ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... ages: he did not stir them as much as the morning and evening breezes among the leaves, or the streams trickling down among the great rocks and wearing their way over precipices. But he moved men and women, of all natures and feelings. He could translate Bach and Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Mozart,—all the great poet-musicians that are silent now, and must be listened to through an interpreter. All the great people and all the little people came to hear him. A princess fell in love with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the triumph of woman's love. It is the story of love's redemption. It has something of the tone, colour, and luxuriance of Solomon's Song; both, too, have the same theme, though treated in a different way.... The form is charming—as if the sonatas of Beethoven had been translated into poetry! The denouement is ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... cities too, and symphonies. Equally her beauty flows Into a savior, or a rose — Looks down in dream, and from above Smiles at herself in Jesus' love. Christ's love and Homer's art Are but the workings of her heart; Through Leonardo's hand she seeks Herself, and through Beethoven speaks In holy thunderings around The awful message of ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... passion. He held his performances cheap after the vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of his 'dear old Corelli,' or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and swaying forests of Beethoven. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and modulus of the suffering which it indicates. A fretful or peevish cry cannot by any efforts make itself impassioned. The cry of impatience, of hunger, of irritation, of reproach, of alarm, are all different—different as a chorus of Beethoven from a chorus of Mozart. But if ever you saw an infant suffering for an hour, as sometimes the healthiest does, under some attack of the stomach, which has the tiger-grasp of the Oriental cholera, then you will hear moans that address to their mothers an ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... adored)—and she, listening, would take her place next at the piano, and reproduce the music morsel by morsel, by ear. A professor was appointed to pronounce sentence on me, and declare if I could be trusted not to misinterpret Mozart, Beethoven, and the other masters who have written for the piano. Through this ordeal I passed with success. As for my references, they spoke for themselves. Not even the lawyer (though he tried hard) could pick holes in them. It was arranged ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... second-rate operas, and devoted his declining energies to oratorio, we have to guess at rather than reach by direct disclosure; and till Mr. Thayer shall take away the mantle which yet covers his Beethoven, we shall know but little of the interior nature of that wonderful man. But Mendelssohn now stands before us, disclosed by the most searching of all processes, his own letters to his own friends. And how graceful, how winning, how true, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... might have liked music, too. An American isn't inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand a year?" Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs. Emery had rebuked the doctor later for "putting ideas ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... music from Bach to Beethoven and from Beethoven to Wagner—yes, even to Richard Strauss—but enthusiasm with discipline? German music has been our mobilization; it has gone on just as in a partitur by Richard Wagner—absolute rapture ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Pons would catch sight of a china cup and buy it in the time that Schmucke took to blow his nose, wondering the while within himself whether the musical phrase that was ringing in his brain—the motif from Rossini or Bellini or Beethoven or Mozart—had its origin or its counterpart in the world of human thought and emotion. Schmucke's economies were controlled by an absent mind, Pons was a spendthrift through passion, and for both the result was the same—they had not a penny ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and 'Pop goes the Weasel' for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:—he won't like to ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... excursions, varied, through the zeal of Talleyrand to ingratiate himself with his new master, by a Mass of great solemnity on the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI. [211] One incident lights the faded and insipid record of vanished pageants and defunct gallantries. Beethoven was in Vienna. The Government placed the great Assembly-rooms at his disposal, and enabled the composer to gratify a harmless humour by sending invitations in his own name to each of the Sovereigns and grandees then in Vienna. Much personal homage, some ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... human effort should be directed toward increasing morality and suppressing violence." This amounts to saying that well-nigh all the art that the world has hitherto seen is false. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Bach, Beethoven, are all, according to Tolstoi, "false reputations, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... not deaf, like Beethoven," he said, trying to please her. "That would have been worse. Do you know, last night Falloden and I had a glorious talk? He was awfully decent. He made me tell him all about Poland and my people. He never scoffed once. He makes me do what the doctor says. And last night—when ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 privileges in life that I know you, the author Covetousness ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger |
