"Meyerbeer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and the Italians. What might have happened if he had been one-eyed I cannot pretend to say. In love with lush, sensuous melody, attracted by the gorgeous pyrotechnical effects in Berlioz and Liszt and the pomposities of Meyerbeer, this Russian, who began study too late and being too lazy to work hard, manufactured a number of symphonic poems. To them he gave strained, fantastic names—names meaningless and pretty—and, as he was short-winded contrapuntally, he wrote his so-called instrumental poems shorter than Liszt's. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... use of the falsetto. Soon it became impossible to be engaged as an "heroic tenor" without at least possessing the high B[b] in the chest tone. The singers found it a more thankful task to humour the taste of the public than to pay extra regard to the intentions of the composer; for often Meyerbeer himself indicates, by a pp, his design that the falsetto and not the chest tone should be employed. That every tenor singer, whether such high pressure suited his natural compass or not, strove to screw his voice up ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke |
