"Grand opera" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and I will sure think of you girls while we're sitting in the baldheaded pews at the Gaiety this winter gloating over the grand opera we're missing!" called Sheridan, rolling his cigar ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... passages of dramatic song, that sudden bewildering ecstasy of the emotions, thoroughly honest and selfless—they were but echoes of his own experiences and sensations, and filled him with glowing hope for the greatest possible power and effect. Thus he recognised grand opera as the means whereby he might express his ruling thoughts; towards it his passions impelled him; his eyes turned in the direction of its home. The larger portion of his life, his most daring wanderings, and his plans, studies, sojourns, and acquaintances ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... herself, "because sometime I'm going to be an opera singer. I did mean to sing in Grand Opera, and maybe I will, but if I can't do that, I'll sing in light opera, and I like to have this picture to remind me how sweet Miss Desmond looks in ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... On the other hand, grand opera does not appeal to me. I can enthuse over the robin's song in the spring, and the sound of the summer wind rippling through the ripened wheat is not without its attractions for me; but when I hear people going into convulsions of joy over Signor Massacre's immortal opera of Medulla ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... not crude, be one fourth of a cent per pound an' tin per cint. ad valorum,' he says, 'which will give th' dog all th' crude fleas he wants, an' yit shut out th' educated flea from compytition with grand opera an' Barnum's circus.' An' so 'twas ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... her voice was not for grand opera, had philosophically descended to the concert stage and was excitedly happy in her success and independence. Elsa ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... high-pitched laugh, and out trips a giddy-dressed fairy in a gilt and rhinestone turban effect with a tall plume stickin' straight up from the front of it. She's one of these big, full-curved, golden brunettes, with long jet danglers in her ears and all the haughty airs of a grand opera star. I didn't dream it was the one we was lookin' for until I sees Ira straighten up and step out ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... the industrial centres were everywhere filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed: and when I learned that the moving picture houses were full to the doors every day and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera, and religious concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country was suffering from an unparalleled depression. This diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It has been freely estimated that at the time ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... The only white writers who have in recent years given adequate attention and study to this music, that I know of, are Mr. H.E. Krehbiel and Mrs. Natalie Curtis Burlin. We have our native composers denying the worth and importance of this music, and trying to manufacture grand opera out of so-called ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... The impulse to grand opera came from a different quarter. A sagacious cleric, the Abbe Perrin, heard, either at Florence or in Paris, from the company of Italian singers brought over in 1645, Peri's "Eurydice," which made a ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... assignment of covering the news of the theatres; he was to ascertain "coming attractions" and any other dramatic items of news interest. One Monday evening, when a multiplicity of events crowded the reportorial corps, Edward was delegated to "cover" the Grand Opera House, where Rose Coghlan was to appear in a play that had already been seen in Brooklyn, and called, therefore, for no special dramatic criticism. Yet The Eagle wanted to cover it. It so happened that Edward had made another ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... pitch. He was as legendary even among the common people as Paganini. His first concert at St. Petersburg realized the then unheard-of sum of L2,000. The roads were crowded to see him pass, and the corridors and approaches to the Grand Opera blocked to catch a glimpse of him. The same scenes were repeated at Moscow, where he gave six concerts without exhausting ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Guzman Blanco, President and Dictator of Venezuela, sojourned in Macuto with his court for the season. That potent ruler —who himself paid a subsidy of 40,000 pesos each year to grand opera in Caracas—ordered one of the Government warehouses to be cleared for a temporary theatre. A stage was quickly constructed and rough wooden benches made for the audience. Private boxes were added for the use of the President and the notables ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... in the rotating Jazz Hall. Special attractions this week include cinema lectures daily on the domestic life of the Solomon Islanders by Mr. Nicholas Ould; a recital on the Bolophone on Thursday by Mr. Tertius Quodling, and, at the Grand Opera House, Pope Joan and The Flip-Flappers. On Saturday the Stridcar Golf Club will hold a series of competitions in rational fancy dress for the benefit of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... little round tables, drinking their coffee and syrups and aperitifs, and gazing, if they were so minded, at the pyjamas and cravats and Brazilian diamonds spread out for inspection before them. A string orchestra, hidden away somewhere in a gallery, was alternating grand opera with the Gondola Girl and the latest gems of Transatlantic melody. From around the tightly-packed tables arose a babble of tongues, made up chiefly of German, a South American rendering of Spanish, and a North American rendering of English, with here and there ...
— When William Came • Saki
... Philadelphia. With the captain in Savannah was his only daughter, Jane Olivia, age a scant eighteen, pretty, charming, romantic and head over heels in love with a handsome baritone then singing in a popular-priced grand opera company. It was because of this handsome baritone, who, by the way, was a Spaniard named Miguel Carlos Speranza, that Jane Snow was then aboard her father's vessel. Captain Lote was not in the habit of taking his women-folks on his voyages with him. "Skirts ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... since in his own mind he had seen no particular reason for infringing upon the conventions of society they had never given him so much as an unquiet thought. Certainly to dine at a restaurant or attend so public a function as grand opera with a person of the opposite sex, seemed to him a singularly harmless choice of indiscretions, and had she made a careless avowal of her intention the matter would probably have dropped at the moment from his thoughts. But the very secretiveness of her manner—the suggestion of a hidden ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... Opera-house, where they begin at midnight and continue till daybreak. No stranger who visits Paris at this season of the year should omit a visit to one of the Bals masques at this theater, for it is difficult to imagine a scene more curious and fantastic than that presented in the Salle of the Grand Opera at a Carnival Ball. On these nights the pit is boarded over and joins the stage; the vast area of the whole theater forming a ball-room of magnificent proportions, which, brilliantly lighted, and crowded ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... the night of Monday and Tuesday, that is to say, the 2d and 3d of June. On the evening of Thursday, the 5th of June, the Grand Opera at Paris was crowded for the second presentation ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... heard till from your last Paper {109a} that Henry was ever thought of for Romeo: I wonder he did not tell me this when he and I were in Paris in 1830, and used to go and see 'La Muette!' (I can hear them calling it now:) at the Grand Opera. I see that 'Queen Mary' has some while since been deposed from the Lyceum; and poor Mr. Irving descended from Shakespeare to his old Melodrama again. All this is still interesting to me down here: much more than ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... to a view of the grand opera house and at the same moment a point of light appeared in the headpiece back of the chair. It was shaded so that the prisoner could not see it and it illumined a graduated white dial on which was a glass ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... laughed, a little silvery laugh which made any memory of grand opera seem harsh and jangling. Both men turned to her in surprise. Neither of them could see any cause for mirth in all ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... bienn content—nous ferons route ensiemble...." I will translate: "I call myself Carlo Veronese—first barytone of the theatre of La Scala, Milan. The signora is my second wife; she is prima donna assoluta of the grand opera, Naples. The little ragazza is my daughter by my first wife. She is the greatest violinist of her age now living—un' ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... of Norwich and his wife, Mrs. Stanley, and went to Lady Morgan's without waiting till the Duchess of Sutherland came. There we found her little rooms full of agreeable people. . . . The next day, Thursday, there was a grand opera for the benefit of the Irish, and all the Diplomatic Corps were obliged to take boxes. Lady Palmerston, who was one of the three patronesses, secured a very good box for us, directly opposite the Queen, and ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... 250,000 copies in less than three months speaks for itself. In inclosing stamps for books, our men readers who will join the "Union" mentioned on page 36 will so state. No names attached to such communications will be published. The partial description of the Grand Opera "Die Walkure" in this book is given precisely as it occurred; and although the up-to-date slang used might suggest exaggeration, such is really not the case. Again we ask that your name be written plainly. This caution is not addressed to the women. We have given up all hope of ever getting ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... season of grand opera in Chicago, a beautiful white-haired woman sat in the same box night after night without attracting particular attention, except as a woman of acknowledged beauty. At a glance it might be thought that her dress, although elegant, was rather simple, but an ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... work. To Claudia also Lorraine was a splendid friend. The girls lived together at a Students' Hostel in London, and shared all their jaunts and pleasures. Claudia held a scholarship at a college of music, and was training for grand opera. With her talent and lovely face she had good prospects before her, but the Castleton strain was strong in her, as also in Morland, and it needed Lorraine's insistent urging to make her realise that it does not do only to dream your ideals, that you must toil at them with strong hands and earth-stained ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... the State society issued a call for a mass-meeting, to which "all women within the boundaries of the State who believed in equal suffrage, or were interested in the fate of the pending amendment," were invited. The meeting was held on May 19, at the Grand Opera House, and the attendance exceeded the most extravagant hopes of those who had called it. If any came to scoff, they remained to participate with pride in this remarkable convention, which is yet frequently referred to as the largest and most impressive meeting ever held in the Hoosier ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... secrets; the other must confine his thinking to the weather and the crops. The one can find entertainment in the Bible and Shakespeare; the other seeks companionship among the cowboys and Indians of the picture-films. The one sits in rapt delight through an evening of grand opera, reveling on the sunlit summits of harmony; the other can rise no higher in the scale of music than the raucous hand organ. The one finds keen delight among the masterpieces of art; the other finds his definition ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... was unable. Then she went to the big salon and, seating herself at the grand piano, played snatches of Grand Opera. But she was too anxious, too impatient for midnight to come and ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... to grand opera last night; magnificent house, scenery, toilets, equipages; but with my three "lacks," a musical ear, a knowledge of French and good eyesight, I could not ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... all is well with my opera, I feel as if my body were afire—my hands and feet tremble with desire to make the Frenchman value and fear the German. Why is no Frenchman ever commissioned to write a grand opera? Why must it always be a foreigner? In my case the most unendurable thing would be the singers. Well, I'm ready. I shall begin no dickerings, but if I am challenged I shall know how to defend myself. But ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Burke, the wrestler, who tied Zabisko once on the stage of the old Grand Opera House in 1913, had been promenading with Mollie Malone, of the Champagne Girls and Gay Burlesquers Company. Both heard the fusillade and saw Mock—a streak of flying blue—pass within ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... and here the boy's devotion deserted, and a growing estrangement began. Dave, knowing his father's wealth, resented his lack of liberality, and he knew him too well to protest. For three months he heeded parental injunction; then a trip to New York to grand opera. Entertainment accepted must be returned. Another wine-supper, paid for by a draft on his father-and family warfare was on! The draft was paid-the family credit must not be questioned, but a house was divided against itself, and the letter David sent Dave left a trail of ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... 17, 1906, Frank and Bertha, who had recently returned, attended the opera. The great Caruso, whose tenor voice had taken the East by storm, and whose salary was reputed to be fabulous, had come at last to San Francisco. Fremsted, almost equally famous, was singing with him in "Carmen" at the Grand Opera House. All the town turned out in broadcloth, diamonds, silks and decollete to hear them—a younger generation of San Franciscans assuming a bit uncomfortably that social importance which had not yet become genealogically ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... the Grand Opera, and the leader of the orchestra, who is a magnificent violinist; that new Spanish painter who plays the guitar divinely; a poet—that is, he has written some pretty songs—besides ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Friday and she didn't sing Delilah to my notion. Did she to yours?" he asked, this time with a smile that was even more interesting than the laugh. "Come over and sit with me by the spring-house and let's discuss grand opera while I eat my supper and wait until I think it is safe to give the ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... forty or fifty friends came on board and amused themselves looking at our curiosities and photographs until long past the dinner hour. We had to hurry on shore to dine, and go afterwards to the Opera Manoel. The new Grand Opera House is not to be opened until next October. It had been blowing fresh and strong from the westward all day, but to-night, as we rowed across the harbour, the breeze had dropped to a flat calm, and Tom is most anxious to be ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... the streets so rapidly that it was practically impossible to save anything in its way. It reached the Grand Opera House on Mission street and in a moment had burned through the roof. The Metropolitan opera company from New York had just opened its season there and all the expensive scenery and costumes were soon reduced to ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... that his lot, like a policeman's, is a very happy one. His Martin, who struck me as a very unpleasant young man, was a composer who meant to achieve immortality, but turned down the broad way of musical comedy and acquired money instead. Just in time he repented and wrote a grand opera, and then Mr. WILSON cut short his career in a fashion that seemed to me regrettably hackneyed, which was the only reason why I shared the other characters' sorrow. Why so many people, all rather nasty people too, came ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... is kept alive mostly by highbrows. While the other types cultivate a taste for grand opera or simulate it because it is supposedly proper, the Cerebral really enjoys it. In the top gallery at any good concert you ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... vaudeville theater, you are in danger of losing property through silly pleasures. If it is a grand opera, you will succeed in you ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... an American lady, who had been studying singing in Milan for three years, came to me in great distress. She had expected to appear in Grand Opera in London, but, alas! her voice broke down, and serious throat troubles manifested themselves. She had lost all the upper notes of her voice from C in alt. down to D in the stave, and what was left of it was thin, reedy, and tremulous, like that of an ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... GRAND OPERA. A disease which breaks out in society every winter and can be cured only by inward applications of a seat in a box and outward applications of diamonds ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... 1875, while the Beecher-Tilton case was being tried in Brooklyn, she delivered her speech on "Social Purity" at the Chicago Grand Opera House, in the Sunday dime-lecture course, facing with trepidation the immense crowd which gathered to hear her. Even the daring Mrs. Stanton had warned her that she would never be asked to speak in Chicago again, and ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... answered, 'for at least twenty minutes you have been complaining, and pardonably, that my friend and I have enjoyed the pleasure of your company yet repaid it with no form of entertainment. I fear we cannot offer you Grand Opera. But if your ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... October 27, 1908, a meeting was held in the Grand Opera House, Chicago, Illinois, in the interest of the Democratic candidates in the campaign then pending. The meeting began a few minutes after midnight, and the immense audience consisted, in a large measure, of actors ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... be bossed by a guy like that, he changed his mind to d—— often. Skinny is always like that. Ever since he's been here, he's been braggin what a fine singer he is; said his voice was trained for Grand Opera. He sang for us last night, a song, entitled "God give us cheap ice, for Heaven's knows we have cheap skates." Believe you me, his voice was trained for Grand Rapids instead of ...
— Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie • Barney Stone
... her not only a great composer, he was one of the dear memories of her youth, her home, and her country, and also a hope for reform in French music, which she found monotonous. It was to please her that the directors of the Grand Opera invited Gluck to come to Paris and produce some of his works. The great reformer of opera had long wished for this opportunity, which he seized with alacrity, and set out from Vienna for Paris in the autumn of 1773. He was received with every kindness and ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... swagger-stick (and him a union man, oughta kicked to his union about the way the conductor treated him) and him coming back with a yawp on the fiddle and getting two laps ahead of the brass band, and they all blowing their stuffings out trying to catch up. Music they call that! And once I went to grand opera—lot of fat Dutchmen all singing together like they was selling old rags. Aw nix, give me one of the good old songs like 'The Last Rose of Summer.'... I bet you could sing that so that even a sporting-goods drummer would cry and think about the sweetheart he had ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the Empire or the Alhambra, at fifteen guineas a turn, that would bring her in five hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. And then she would go to the Folies Bergere in Paris, and finally to Petersburg and Milan, and then come back to dance in the Grand Opera season, under Gus Harris, with a great international reputation, and hung with flowers and medals and diamond sun-bursts ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... music come further absurdities. Melodious voicing of our thoughts is in itself essentially unnatural, to say the least. Grand opera, great art form as it may be, is hopelessly artificial. Indeed, so far is it removed from the plane of every day existence that we are rudely jolted by the introduction of too commonplace a thought, as when Sharpless in the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... displayed a natural barbaric dignity as he stood, offering the cards suavely to some, allowing others to pass unmolested. Every half minute he chanted a harsh, unintelligible phrase akin to the jabber of car conductors and grand opera. And not only did he withhold a card this time, but it seemed to Rudolf that he received from the shining and massive black countenance a look of ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... seldom a thing of nationality or locality. Early opera in Germany was Italian and the French grand opera school was founded by a Florentine. The style of music that appeals most keenly to the people of a country or community influences largely the method and manner of its native composers. Authors, musical and literary, write more often to fill a demand, subjectively felt ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... the voice, and the variations of strength with which they are sounded and sung, but in respect of the changes of key, the changes of time, the changes of timbre of the voice, and the many other modifications of expression. While between the old monotonous dance-chant and a grand opera of our own day, with its endless orchestral complexities and vocal combinations, the contrast in heterogeneity is so extreme that it seems scarcely credible that the one should have been the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... winter conspiracies had failed. In vain was the trip to Baltimore; in vain was the week with grand opera in New York, and they both knew that the proposed trip to Europe never would occur. When the parents saw that look of triumphant joy in their daughter's face, when they saw how it lighted up her countenance like a flame when Tom Van Dorn was near or was on his way to her, they knew ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the musical season, and I attended everything from grand opera to music-hall. For the first and most obvious procedure was to assume that the Lady Allegra was a professional singer. Either that or in the very front rank of amateurs. As to the latter, I had always been more or less in with the musical set, and I knew of no one who came within ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... and drew a long breath, seeking to drive away his growing intoxication. He had passed the Grand Opera and was reaching the crossway of the Rue Drouot. Perhaps his increase of fever was due to those glowing Boulevards. The private rooms of the restaurants were still ablaze, the cafes threw bright radiance across the road, the pavement was blocked by ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... usual standard. He had seen everything worth seeing in London and in Paris, between which cities he seemed to oscillate with such frequency that he might be said to live in both places at once. He had his stall at Covent Garden, and his stall at the Grand Opera. He was a subscriber at the Theatre Francais. He had seen all the races at Longchamps and Chantilly, as well as at Sandown and Ascot. But every now and then he and Mr. Smithson drifted from the customary talk about operas and races, pictures and French novels, to the wider world ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... dissolved by slow enchantment until there lay revealed the plain and the shimmering ocean with its distant islands trembling in the haze. At sunset my eyes sought the mountains, mountains unreal, like glorified scenery of grand opera, with violet shadows in the wooded canon clefts, and crags of pink tourmaline and ruby against the skies. All day long in the tempered heat flowers blazed around me, insects hummed, lizards darted in and out of the terrace wall, birds flashed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Four months later Princess Lemoine lost her wonderful pearl necklace while sitting in a box at the Grand Opera in Paris. This was one of the cleverest thefts that ever baffled the police, for the necklace was never recovered. We know, however, that Jack Andrews occupied the box next to that of the princess. A coincidence—perhaps. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... a good deal, Martha," came in a hearty grand opera voice just as I dropped on my knee, and in time to stop me from taking that bleeding gold head on my own breast and—"Jacob's bullet just clipped me but its impact was as good as his fist would have been, ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... love to you all; she cannot possibly write, for she has still to say her officium. We came home very late from the grand opera rehearsal. I must go to-morrow after high mass to the illustrious Electress; she is resolved absolument to teach me to knit filee. I am very eager about this, as she and the Elector wish that I should knit in ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... finest operas, in Italian, German or French. She can dance the Boston and Rush Polka with unrivalled grace, she can flirt and affect the most becoming airs, she never misses a matinee or evening performance at the Grand Opera House; she can do the "grape-vine" exquisitely on her silver-plated skates, and can toss the tennis ball with ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... its breadth, for the splendid edifices it exhibits, or for the scenes and events it has witnessed, but famous for the exploits beheld by its neighbors, and the magnificent structures by them displayed. Not that the Rue Lepelletier can boast no fine edifices, for the grand opera-house would give the loud lie to such an assertion. And then there is the Foreign Office near by, the Hotel of the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue des ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg |
