"Chopin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arrive at the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them. They are the mere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach. And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorak? He writes passionate, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... really a great artist. As an interpreter of Chopin she had no rival among women, and only one man was her equal. She had fire, tenderness, passion, strength; she had beyond all these, soul, which is worth more in true expression than the most marvelous technique. She had chosen ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... by her own efforts,—the joy of a little pleasure, or a little scarcely perceptible advance in her position or her work. Indeed, if one month she could only earn five francs more than in the last, or if she could at length manage to play a certain passage of Chopin which she had been struggling with for weeks,—she would be quite happy. Her work, which was not excessive, exactly fitted her aptitude for it, and gave her a healthy satisfaction. Playing, singing, giving lessons gave her a pleasant feeling of satisfied activity, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... very well. Won't you come and hear me play the castanets, if Monsieur Enguerrand can spare you? There is a young Polish pianist who is to play our accompaniment. Ah, there is nothing like a Polish pianist to play Chopin! He is charming, poor young man! an exile, and in poverty; but he is cared for by those ladies, who take him everywhere. That is the sort of life I should like—the life of Madame Strahlberg—to be a young widow, free to do ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... to supply the place of the hammer and the anvil the smart folks always add musical accompaniment to the confusion of tongues, and Mr. Koenig, who has a choral company, goes to the cream of the cream of such gatherings, and sings and plays from Grieg and Schumann, and Liszt and Wagner, and Chopin and Paderewski, and the place intended for me in this grand organization would appear to be that of jester to my lords and ladies. 'Ach Gott!' says Mr. Koenig, who 'speaks ver' bad de Englisch,' 'your great people vant de last ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... gently in the light breeze. The town band was now allowed a moment's rest. The whole way from the church it had played incessantly an indescribable air; and it was only in the evening, when an account appeared in the papers, that the air was recognized as Chopin's Funeral March. ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... then Georgie sat down to practise, and Candace settled herself in a deep cushioned chair in the library with Motley's "Dutch Republic," which she was reading for the first time. It was the chapter on the siege of Leyden; and the wild, fantastic nocturne by Chopin which Georgie was playing, seemed to blend and mix itself with the tragic narrative. Candace did not know how long the reading and the music had been going on, each complementing the other. She was so absorbed in ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... deliciously restful they were after the loud roar of the cannon and the rattle of the machine-guns! Who would have thought that such deep, and also such solemn, notes could come from so small a steeple? It stirred the heart and brought tears to the eyes, like some of Chopin's music. Those bells seemed to speak to us, they seemed to call us to prayer and preach courage and virtue ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... the bed, and if we have learned to love it too much to cut off its feet and thus make it fit (as did that old robber of Attica), why we run the risk of having some critic wise in his theoretical knowledge, say, as was and is said of Chopin, "He is weak ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... at her best during a very difficult lesson at the piano from a professor who came from London. Betty had always a passionate love of music, and to-day she revelled in it. She had been learning one of Chopin's Nocturnes, and now rendered it with exquisite pathos. The professor was delighted, and in the midst of the performance Mrs. Haddo came into the music-room. She listened with approval, and when the girl rose, said, ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... his shoulders, and plunges into the program that he has played at all weddings for fifteen years past. It begins with Mendelssohn's Spring Song, pianissimo. Then comes Rubinstein's Melody in F, with a touch of forte toward the close, and then Nevin's "Oh, That We Two Were Maying" and then the Chopin waltz in A flat, Opus 69, No. 1, and then the Spring Song again, and then a free fantasia upon "The Rosary" and then a Moszkowski mazurka, and then the Dvorak Humoresque (with its heart-rending cry in the middle), and then some vague and turbulent thing (apparently the disjecta membra ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... he stopped as he was descending the stairs. A German voice said, 'Sure enough, my jolly landlord, she's there, in Worms—your Bormio. Found her at the big hotel: spoke not a syllable; stole away, stole away. One chopin of wine! I'm off on four legs to the captain. Those lads who are after her by Roveredo and Trent have bad noses. "Poor nose—empty belly." Says the captain, "I stick at the point of the cross-roads." Says I, "Herr Captain, I'm back to you first ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... leave Paris.... Of course I was playing Chopin bits, with an ache in my heart to match, that I couldn't bear and was enjoying to the utmost. What do girls play now? Then all of us had attacks of Chopin. Madame used to laugh and say, 'I hear the harbour bar still ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... a long golden hour at the piano, she chanced to take down the Largo in the Chopin sonata. As she began it, something stirred in her mind, some memory that instantly lived with the first notes of the music. How thick-clustered with associations music became, waking a hundred ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... small, as well as great, harmonies of nature, paused for a moment to listen to the luscious piping of the feathered minstrel, that in its own wild woodland way had as excellent an idea of musical variation as any Mozart or Chopin. Leaning against one of the park benches, with his back turned to the main thoroughfare, he did not observe the approach of a man's tall, stately figure, that, with something of his own light, easy, swinging step, had followed him rapidly along for some little distance, and that now halted ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... pleasures of the summer Jacques kept as near as he could to Serena. If he learned a new tune, by listening to the piano—some simple, artful air of Mozart, some melancholy echo of a nocturne of Chopin, some tender, passionate love-song of Schubert—it was to her that he would play it first. If he could persuade her to a boat-ride with him on the lake, Sunday evening, the week was complete. He even learned ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... unheard-of fiddling. It was his privilege to drive Liszt back to the piano with an ambition to rival Paganini; as rival him he did. Next Berlioz and romanticism fevered his brain, and then in 1831, the twenty-year-old Liszt and the twenty-one-year-old Chopin struck up their historic friendship, and the two men glittered and flashed in the most artistic salons of Paris. It was about this time that the Polish Countess Plater said, speaking of the genial Ferdinand Hiller and the ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... many lives for himself: a general, like Caesar, he was to conquer the world and die murdered in a great marble hall; a wandering minstrel, he would go through all countries singing and have intricate endless adventures; a great musician, he would sit at the piano playing, like Chopin in the engraving, while beautiful women wept and men with long, curly hair hid their faces in their hands. It was only slavery that he had not foreseen. His race had dominated for too many centuries for that. And yet the world was made of ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... only study which ever conquered her indolence. Here it happened that a famous musician, who settled in Cambridge for a time, came across her gift and took notice of it. And to please him she worked with industry, even with doggedness. Brahms, Chopin, Wagner—these great romantics possessed her in music as Shelley or Rossetti did in poetry. "You little demon, Laura! How do you come to play like that?" a girl friend—her only intimate friend—said to her once in despair. "It's the expression. Where do you get it? And I practise, ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he went into one of the glass showrooms, a prettily furnished apartment whose most notable article of furniture was a grand piano in exquisitely matched Circassian walnut. Absorbed and radiant, Mark put back the cover, twirled the stool, and carefully opened a green book marked "Chopin." Then he sat down, and, with the sigh of a happy child falling upon a feast, ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... fruit. Schnitz, schnitzen,(Ger.) - To chop, chip, snip. Schönheitsidéal,(Ger.) - The ideal of beauty. Schopenhauer - A celebrated German "philosophical physiologist." Schoppen,(Ger.) - A liquid measure, chopin, pint. Schrocken(Erschrocken) - Frightened. Schwaben - Suabia. Schwan,(Ger.) - Swan. Schweinblatt - (Swine) Dirty paper. Schweitzer kase,(Ger.) - Swiss cheese. Schwer,(Ger.) - Heavy. Schwig, Swig, ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... dost thou remember, we sat under an agate tree and thou didst say to me, 'Why love? See ochra is growing all around and I love thee; but the ochra will cease to grow, and I shall cease to love.'" Then the fog comes on again, Hoffman appears on the scene, the wood-nymph whistles a tune from Chopin, and suddenly out of the fog appears Ancus Marcius over the roofs of Rome, wearing a laurel wreath. "A chill of ecstasy ran down our backs and we parted for ever"—and ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the pianist's real attractiveness. If Mr. Frohman's "vitality" means the "vital spark," the "life element," it comes very close to a true definition of magnetism, for success without this precious Promethean force is inconceivable. It may be only a smouldering ember in the soul of a dying Chopin, but if it is there it is irresistible until it becomes extinct. Facial beauty and physical prowess all made way for the kind of magnetism that Socrates, George Sand, Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, Paganini, Emerson, Dean Swift or ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... dynasties, and through Jesuit instrumentality, religious liberty and national independence were lost, and Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. As a race the Poles boast such names as Copernicus the astronomer, Kosciusko the patriot warrior, and Chopin the composer."[66] ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... had been served in the drawing-room, Hood, again dominating the company (much to Deering's disgust), suggested music. Pierrette contributed a flashing, golden Chopin waltz and Pantaloon Schubert's "Serenade," which he played atrociously, whereupon Hood announced that he would sing a Scotch ballad, which he proceeded to do surprisingly well. The evening could not last forever, and Deering chafed at his inability ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... But my fingers were stiff and my touch was wooden—so it was small wonder my poor lord and master tried to bury himself in his four-day-old newspaper. Then I tried Schubert's Rosamonde, though that wasn't much of a success. So I wandered on through Liszt to Chopin. And even Chopin struck me as too soft and sugary and far-away for a ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... smooth and velvety. Indeed, it was a little harsh and was likened to the taste of a bitter orange. But it was just the voice for a tragedy or an epic, for it was superhuman rather than human. Light things like Spanish songs and Chopin mazurkas, which she used to transpose so that she could sing them, were completely transformed by that voice and became the playthings of an Amazon or of a giantess. She lent an incomparable grandeur to tragic parts and to the severe dignity of ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... that the rhythmic pulses | | which come most naturally to us are in twos and threes and | | their multiples; while even to beat time in fives requires a | | special effort. In music 5/8 or 5/4 time is extremely rare. | | There is an example of the latter in Chopin's Sonata I (the | | larghetto movement). ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... drooped in shower of gold over a bush of delicate white guelder-rose as Zeus over Danae. Upon the wall of the home wistaria hung her pastel-shaded pendants of flower, like the notes of some beautiful melody, sweet and sad, along the giant staves of her stem. A Chopin could have harmonized the melody, weaving in little trills and silvery treble notes from the joy-song of the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... gift of singing speech, but his poetry lacks intellectual content. In the volume Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), there is a dreamy charm, like the hesitating notes of Chopin. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... it was now a Queen Anne Chateau dripping with Dew-dads of Scroll Work and congested with Black Walnut. The Goddess took her Mocha in the Feathers, and a Music Teacher came twice each week to bridge the awful chasm between Dorothy and Chopin. Dinner had been moved up to Milking Time. Sweetbreads and Artichokes came into the Lives of the Trio thus favored ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... cover all the space; but now they bear, For clover-blooms, fair, stately heads of men With poets' faces heartsome, dear and pale — Sweet visages of all the souls of time Whose loving service to the world has been In the artist's way expressed and bodied. Oh, In arms' reach, here be Dante, Keats, Chopin, Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo, Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach, And Buddha (sweetest masters! Let me lay These arms this once, this humble once, about Your reverend necks — the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the piano, as was a not infrequent custom of hers before going to bed, not so much because of her enthusiasm for music, but because she did not want to retire to rest too early. On such occasions she played, for the most part, the few pieces which she still knew by heart—mazurkas by Chopin, some passages from one of Beethoven's sonatas, or the Kreisleriana. Sometimes she improvised as well, but never pursued the theme beyond a succession of chords, which, indeed, were always ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... against it but to draw down the blinds and shut out this angry gloom in the glow of the lamps within. And, with a half hour of such glow to cozen them, the two women were soon merry again over their reminiscences, Mrs. Pollard at her embroidery, Mrs. Reeves at the piano, strumming something from Chopin in the intervals ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as a matter of mercy, say something in defence of those who cannot understand or win emotions from such things as classical music or the "advanced" drama. Pray, in pity's name, what is to be said against the commonplace man who hears an accomplished musician play Beethoven, Bach, or Chopin in his—the commonplace one's—drawing-room, and who says in agony, "Very fine! Very deep! Very profound—profound indeed, sir! Full of breadth and symmetry and that sort of thing! Now do you think we might ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... within a hundred yards of home, and had read the stinging paragraph beneath a lamp-post almost at his own doorstep. He entered the house noiselessly, and from Madge's music-room there floated down to him the sound of Chopin's great Funeral March. She played this and some other favourites of her own as few musicians play them, for music had been the one delight of her life, and but for the fleeting theatrical ambition, and for Paul, she ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... secretary wrote me a note. It was a nice enough note, of course, but I knew what it meant. I see now well enough that my fingers were rather stiffer than I realized, and that my 'Twinkling Sprays' and 'Fluttering Zephyrs' were not quite up to date. They wanted Grieg and Lassen and Chopin. 'Very well,' said I, 'just wait.' Now, I never knuckle under. I never give up. So I sent right out for a teacher. I practised scales an hour a day for weeks and months. Granger thought I was going crazy. I tackled Grieg and Lassen ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller |
