"Chopin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pleasant and some painful experiences. Joachim, the great violinist, and a great favourite of his, died in August, and his death was followed next month, September, by that of the composer Grieg, the "Chopin of the North," as the Emperor called him, whose friendship the Emperor had acquired on one of his Norwegian trips. Quite at the end of the year his early tutor, Dr. Hinzpeter, for whom he always had a semi-filial ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... perhaps. The owner evidently sets beauty of form before beauty of colour. It is a woman's room and it has a certain delicate austerity. By the time you have observed everything MRS. FARRANT has played Chopin's prelude opus 28, number 20 from ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... divines etoiles." I know not what instrument to compare with his verse. I suppose I should say a flute; but it seems to me more like a marvellously toned piano. His hands pass over the keys, and he produces Chopin-like music. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... many instances of genius as sensitive as Hawthorne's in various branches of art: Shelley and Southey, Schubert and Chopin, Correggio and Corot. Southey not only blushed red but blushed blue—as if the life were going out of him; and in Chopin and Correggio at least we feel that they could not have been what they were without it. Napoleon, whose nerves were like steel ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Polonaise of Chopin's on a cottage piano. She played fairly well, but not remarkably. She had been trained by a competent master and had a good deal of execution. But her playing lacked that grip and definite intention which are the blood and bone of a performance. Several people ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... concert or opera? It is a fixed and permanent expression, for we can renew it so long as men preserve the score where it is written; and, finally, it is free—who can find any practical or moral or scientific purpose in an etude of Chopin or a symphony of Mozart? Music is the most signal example of a mode of expression that has attained to a complete and pure aesthetic character, an unmixed beauty. Yet this was not true of music in its ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... German word for cut and dried 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, verb. - To drink by large draughts. Schwigs, Swig, n. - A large draught. ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... the flowers in the tall silver vases on the piano—her piano!—the spirit of desire which had so long possessed him, waking and sleeping, returned,—returned to torture him now with greater skill amidst these her possessions; her volume of Chopin on the rack, bound in red leather and stamped with her initials, which compelled his glance as he passed, and brought vivid to his memory the night he had stood in the snow and heard her playing. So, he told himself, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... once to my friend, Frederick Rackeman, that Chopin's music made me think of Taglioni's dancing, to which he replied, to my great surprise, that Chopin had said that he had more than once received his inspiration from Taglioni's dancing; a curious instance of influence so strong as to be recognized by one who was perfectly ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... otherwise, that passed through Antwerp made his rooms a favorite resort and house of call. And Barty was introduced into a world as delightful to him as it was new—and to music that ravished his soul with a novel enchantment: Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Schumann—and he found that Schubert had written a few other ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... much new material given to the public for the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved;" the letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... passes away, 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
... piano playing world do without the music of Frederic Chopin? We can hardly think of the piano without thinking of Chopin, since he wrote almost exclusively for the universal instrument. His music touches the heart always rather than the head, the emotional message far outweighs the intellectual meaning. It is vital music—love music, ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... from Huferschingen; but it had been made the headquarters of the keepers, and just outside this room there were a number of pegs for them to sling their guns and bags on when they came in of an evening to have a pipe and a chopin of white wine. Ziska's uncle and aunt were both large, stout, and somnolent people, very good-natured and kind, but a trifle dull. Ziska really had the management of the place, and she was not slow to lend a hand if the servants were remiss in waiting on us. But that, it ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... we arrived I made pa slip off his shoes under the chair, for his socks to dry. I had been studying for eight years then and my teacher was arranging a recital. Strangest thing, but De Pachman played every single thing of Chopin's that I had on my own little repertoire, only under his touch it was real lace played into perfect design. I think pa must have lived through everything with me that night. He's got the finest musical instinct in the family, Millie included. We didn't say a ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... 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, ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... "Regret," or that indescribably affecting capriccio of his marked as "Opus 33"? Which is higher as a work of art,—that in its sadness unparalleled song of Shakespeare, "Blow, blow, thou Winter wind," or his "Othello"? Or again; which is a higher work of art, a nocturne by Chopin, or a sonata by Beethoven; an Essay by Macaulay, or a "Decline and Fall" by Gibbon? Lastly, which is higher as a work of art,—the wonderfully accurate spiritedness of Schreyer's painting of a horse, or the indescribable power ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... more ambitious spirits spin The web of life for weal or woe, Whilst I above my violin Shall sit and watch the vale below All crimson in the afterglow; And when the patient stars grow bright I'll draw across the strings my bow Till Chopin ushers in the night. ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... looking very much better than you did a month after your illness, Mrs. Fullerton," said Joseph Fleming, who was to take a hand, while Hadria played Grieg or Chopin, or Scottish melodies to please the old people. The whist-players enjoyed ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... From the time of Liszt, who not only revolutionized the performance of music on the piano, but also the way of writing it, authors give to performers all necessary indications, and they have only to carefully observe them. There are, however, some interesting remarks applicable to the music of Chopin which recent editions unfortunately are commencing to falsify. Chopin detested the abuse of the pedal. He could not bear that through an ignorant employment of the pedal two different chords should be ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... beauty, but, judging from her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot, who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was—well, some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... may say, more to himself than to us, he sang that Scotch song, "Turn ye to me," which to my ear at least stands a head and shoulders taller and lovelier than any folk song in all the world, unless it's that Norman sailor song that Chopin used in one of ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... scurry of feet as the men rush in to the one center in the whole camp where they can congregate. Martin Harvey has just been here to cheer them up, and they were enthusiastic over a fine lecture and recital last night on Chopin. The Colonel in command takes particular pride in the Y M C A for his men, and states that crime among them has been reduced ninety per ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... to the eyes of the old priest, a little American had been brought across the seas to play a reverie of Chopin in the little ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... I stood watch, the three others rolling up in their blankets among the luggage. It occurred to me for the first time that we had a phonograph under the cargo. I went down after it. At random I chose a record and set the machine going. It was a Chopin Nocturne played on a 'cello—a vocal yearning, a wailing of frustrate aspirations, a brushing of sick wings across the gates of heavens never to be entered; and then the finale—an insistent, feverish repetition of the human ache, ceasing ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her saying, as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, as long as you live, that you have heard Chopin play." It was in one of the lubberly houses of the Place Vendome that the poet of the keyboard died a few days later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de Musset. A brass ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... holding Kirk's hands, pushed him gently into the chair he had himself been sitting in. There was a little time of stillness, filled only by the crack and rustle of the fire. Then, into the silence, crept the first dew-clear notes of Chopin's F Sharp Major Nocturne. The liquid beauty of the last bars had scarcely died away, when the unseen piano gave forth, tragically exultant, the glorious chords of the Twentieth Prelude—climbing higher ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... the pathology of style; it is a phase that should be produced by the prosecution, not by the eloquent advocate for the defence. Moreover, I do not believe Mr. Arthur Symons admires them any more than I do; he never mentions them in his text. 'Le Debris d'un Poete,' the 'Coiffing,' 'Chopin's Third Ballad,' and those for Salome would have sufficed. With these omissions the monograph might have been smaller; but it would have been more truly representative of Beardsley's genius and Mr. Arthur ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... fountainheads of this literature in the works of a few great masters who have set the pace and established the limits for all the rest. In the line of purely instrumental music this has been done by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. The latter, who exercised a vast influence upon the manner of developing a musical thought and in the selection of the orchestral colors in which it can be expressed advantageously, powerfully stimulated all composers later than himself, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... found dead in his room, the violin at his neck, the bow upon the strings, his music open before him at Chopin's funeral march. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... nine children, from the elder fiery Achilles to the younger hysterical Niobe. There were perfume-bottles enough to start a coiffeur in business, and woolly lambs enough for a dozen pastoral poems or as many bucolic butchers. But the piano was piled high with Beethoven's sonatas and Chopin's delicious dream-music, while a deluge of French novels had evidently surged over that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... cab 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 might have become famous as an executant He stood in the ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... thoroughly, if somewhat heartlessly, good-natured, and (not merely at the times mentioned, but to the end of her life) an affectionate mother, a delightful hostess, and a very satisfactory friend. No imaginary Stenio or Karol, no actual Sandeau or Musset or Chopin could have caused her at any time of her life the misery which the Prince caused Lucrezia, because she would simply have "sent him walking," as the vigorous French idiom has it. But it pleased her to graft upon her actual nature something else that it lacked, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... piano a man sat playing the "Revolutionary Etude" of Chopin. The room was magnificent in its proportions, its furnishings were massive, its paneled oak walls were hung with portraits of men and women in the costumes of a bygone day. Through the lofty windows, the casements of which were open to the evening sky there ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... 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 most containing clasp, For all in all, this world e'er saw!) and there, Yet further on, bright ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... humming-bird's throat. Over such spots one sits in his boat spell-bound, color-entranced, and the ears of his soul listen to color music as thrilling, as enchanting as melodies by Foster and Balfe, minuets by Mozart and Haydn, arias by Handel, nocturnes and serenades by Chopin and Schumann, overtures by Rossini, massive choruses and chorals by Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn, fugues by Bach, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Chopin's Marche Funebre affects me very disagreeably. The music is, to me, absolutely repugnant. The beautiful melody in the second movement is, however, to me exceedingly agreeable and affords me intense pleasure and gratification. The lower animals are likewise ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... of "Life of Chopin," written by Franz Liszt and translated from the french by Martha Walker Cook. The original edition was published in 1863; a fourth, revised edition (1880) was used in making this e-text. This e-text reproduces the fourth edition ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... corner, opened in a moment of aimless wandering to and fro. Margot was no great performer, but what she could play she played by heart, and Nature had provided her with a sweet, thrush-like voice, with that true musical thrill which no teaching can impart. At the first few bars of a Chopin nocturne Mr Macalister's newspaper wavered, and fell to his knee. Margot heard the rustle of it, slid gradually into a simpler melody, and was conscious of a heavy hand waving steadily ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... poem by a woman? where the great musical composition? In the grammar of literature what is the feminine of Homer, of Shakspere, of Goethe, of Hugo? What female names are the equivalents of the names of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner? Women are not musicians—they "sing and play." In short, if woman had no better claim to respect and affection than her brain; no sweeter charms than those of her reason; no means of suasion ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... another place. On the last morning, master and pupil spoke but little. Ivan sat drearily strumming out one of the nocturnes of that young countryman of Ludmillo's, lately dead but already hailed immortal by a select few, Monsieur Chopin; and the heart-break in its strange harmonies seemed to express all that neither of them dared attempt to say. Fortunately, the strain did not last long. It was barely ten o'clock when Casimir, having imprinted a kiss upon the hand of his Princess, and actually left another ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... 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 ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 new ting. One lady she say to me, "Dear Mr. Koenig, I tink I ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... 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
... 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
... the 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 and Chopin—yes, and Tschaikowsky, too. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... than a fine overture played by a full orchestra. In all music there is, besides the thought of the composer, the soul of the performer, who, by a privilege granted to this art only, can give both meaning and poetry to passages which are in themselves of no great value. Chopin proves, for that unresponsive instrument the piano, the truth of this fact, already proved by Paganini on the violin. That fine genius is less a musician than a soul which makes itself felt, and communicates ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... see to this. She plays the little piece delightfully, and has promised me to let it exercise its charms upon you. I shall, therefore, ere long send you a copy of the new version of the "Berceuse" addressed "to the Princess Marcelline Czartoryska, Klostergasse 4." [A pupil of Chopin's] Wend yourway thither—and, in case you do not find the Princess at home, leave the manuscript with your card. I have already told her of your contemplated visit, and have spoken of you as my heart's kinsman and friend. You will find the Princess Cz. possessed ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... locked together in silence until the room was quite dark, lit only by the vague lamplight which shone in through the fine lace curtains from the street. Then Mary rose and played a little, very softly, in the darkness, morsels of Chopin, until the footman came in with a bright lamp, announcing that dinner was on the table. And ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... the balcony up above; it had never stopped once, so silent had he been. It was that Phillida, with the large dark eyes, and she was playing something that Lettice sometimes played, and very nearly, though naturally not quite, as well. Pocket would have said that it was Mendelssohn, or Chopin, "or something," for his love of music was greater than his knowledge. But it was not exactly the music that detained him; he was thinking more of the musician, who had shown him kindness, after all. It ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... A guest asked the hostess to play something. Seating herself at the piano, the good woman executed a Chopin nocturne with precision. She finished, and there was still an interval of waiting to be bridged. In the grim silence she turned to an old gentleman on her ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... that hung over his collar and queer eyes that seemed to look through and through one. But after she had heard him play she lost her shyness, for in his music she heard the voices she loved. He called her "little one," and told her long stories of Liszt and Chopin and the other masters. "They are the people that live ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... played the Chopin Grande Polonaise, or as much of it as her fingers, tempestuous and inexpert, could clutch and reach. She played, neither with her hands nor with her brain, but with her temperament, febrile and frustrate, seeking its outlet in exultant ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... finds 'kings in exile' a bit embarrassing. Don Manuel was a music-lover, and especially fond of Bach. I had had long talks with the young king at various times, and my sympathies had been aroused in his behalf. On the evening of which I speak I played a Chopin Nocturne, and I know that into my playing there went some of my feeling for the pathos of the situation of this young stranger in a strange land, of my own age, eating the bitter bread of exile. When I had finished, the ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... the occupations and 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 to know the more shy and delicate forest-blossoms that she preferred, and would ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... Headquarters in Newburgh, bears the name of "Geo. Astor & Co., Cornhill, London;" while still another in my immediate neighborhood in Washington has the inscription of "Astor and Camp, 79 Cornhill, London." Their octaves were few in number, and a pupil of Chopin would have regarded them with scorn; but upon these little spindle-legged affairs a duet could be performed. My first knowledge of instrumental music was derived from one of these pianos, and among ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... 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 ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... from Alexandria were making the Natchez pilgrimage and came unwarned upon "Goat Castle." Lovely strains of music could be heard, coming from an old piano, sometimes improvised, sometimes a bit of Bach, Mozart, Chopin, played with much feeling. As the strangers approached the house they were shocked at the dilapidation—sash missing in the windows, doors off hinges, boards decayed and missing from the house and porch. ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... genius of the man were vain—he had elements in his character that made him akin to Keats, Shelley, Burns, Byron, Chopin and Stephen Crane. With these his name will in brotherhood be forever linked. He was one made to suffer, sin and die—a few short summers, and autumn came with yellow leaves and he was gone. And the principal legacy he left us is the thought of wonder as to what he might ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... this German melodist could only be either the Viennese Schubert or the French Pole Chopin, but with my English pronunciation I failed to make the distinction. Then a young lady, who had been sitting near, proposed to clear the matter up by playing a piece composed by Sciupe, and if I would listen ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... "Chopin, my friend," said the lady who had attached herself to Harkless. She tapped Tom's shoulder with her fan and ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... she would carry herself now. He caught up the book he had come for, and went downstairs to the piazza. Sylvia had vanished. Disappointed, he went back into the house. Straying to the piano, he sat down and began to play a Chopin prelude. It was John's one and only instrumental achievement, learned by ear, and dug out of the ivories, as one might say, by long hours of ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... 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 ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... cried excitedly. "It's something of Chopin's, a nocturne, I think. Girls, I know where I heard that selection played just ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... so charmed and captivated the lady on his right, would, when once in this room, sit astride some chair, a pipe in one hand, a mug of beer in the other. Here he would discuss with Simmons or Jack or Oliver his preference of Chopin over Beethoven, or the difference between Parepa-Rosa and Jenny Lind, or any topic which had risen out of the common talk, and all too with a grotesqueness of speech and manner that would have frozen his hostess of the dinner-table ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... spoke no more about music. And long before we reached the hotel she who had played—I cannot say for certain what she played that day in the Luxembourg Gardens; my love of music was not then fully awakened; could it have been?—the names of Bach and Chopin come up in my mind—"I can't speak about music," she said, as we turned into the Rue du Bac, and she ran up the stairs of the hotel possessed completely by the other Mildred. She asked her mother to play the "Brooklyn ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... them, upon the occasion of a family celebration, the "Little Swiss Boy" or the "Rocks of St. Malo." The result was she had been requested to go on with lessons that had had such a favorable beginning, and my musical education was entrusted to her until it came time for me to play the music of Chopin and Liszt. ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... whose general rendezvous just then was Paris. A very Pantheon must have been an intimate circle that included, among others, George Sand, Daniel Stern, Heine, the Polish poet Mickiewicz, Eugene Delacroix, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Hiller, and Frederic Chopin. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... the tremendous incident, and to his effort and vain dream I shall revert in the next chapter of this book. Now I must on with the history of the patriarchs. The story of Abraham and his attempted offering of Isaac has been much used as oratorio material, and Joseph Elsner, Chopin's teacher, brought out a Polish opera, "Ofiara Abrama," at ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... stocks aright! When our ears wild noises shook, On the sky we cast no look, Neither stock nor stone reviewed, But were punished as we stood. Seest thou now, licentious wight? That, to us, yon flaring sun Is the Heidelbergers' tun; Castles, mountains, trees, and towers, Seem like chopin-cups of ours. Learn'st thou now, licentious wight? Learn it in the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... is to be boxed up in that prison! It helps to show, however, what a rabid hatred the Mallorcans have of all manner of disease. Read George Sand's book about the island if you want to understand that. She brought Chopin here long ago, and wintered with him at the Valledemosa Convent, hoping to save him from consumption. The people in the village there are as hospitable as any in the world as a general thing, but they ostracized ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... influences that are at work in Europe today, he retained his individuality to the end, developing his style, however, and evincing new ideas in each succeeding work. His untimely death at the age of thirty-seven, a short life—like those of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Hugo Wolf—has robbed the world of one of its noblest singers, one of those few men of modern times who found expression in the language of musical song, a lyricist of ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... know; that was bad—and I won't again, truly," promised Billy. But her eyes danced, and the next moment she had whirled about on the piano stool and dashed into a Chopin waltz. The room itself, then, seemed to be full of ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... has the 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
... 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 of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... modern piano sonata is to me anathema as a rule, there are none of MacDowell's works that I like better than his writings in this form. They are to me far the best since Beethoven, not excepting even Chopin's (pace his greatest prophet, Huneker). They seem to me to be of such stuff as Beethoven would have woven had he known in fact the modern ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Oxford, it was with some vague notion of subsequently entering the Church; but at Oxford he became speedily convinced that there was no Church left for him to enter. Then he fell back on aestheticism—worshipped Carpaccio, adored Chopin, and turned his rooms at Merton into a museum of old tapestry, Roman brass-work, and Venetian glass. Then he dabbled a little in Comtism; but very soon he threw aside that gigantic make-believe at believing. Nevertheless, whatever ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... two worlds, took his place on the little country platform and played for them on his 'cello. The Judge and Mrs. Ellis enjoyed it just as the Robbinses did. It was a novel treat to hear the strains of Lizst and Chopin sounding in the purple silences of those old country hills, but when he had finished, Cynthy leaned over to Kit, who sat next to her and who was in an ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... halls until the ear catches only a faint echo from some far, dim aisle. "How many centuries elapsed before this subterranean organ gave forth its delightful tones!" It lacked only the soul of a Beethoven or Chopin to interpret them aright. How like many noble lives whose talents perhaps shall only bud "unseen" or waste upon the desert air of environment. One thinks of Keats, whose wonderful Ode to the Nightingale and lovely Nature Poems might never have been sung had ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... He had planned so 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 ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... little further along, on the opposite side of the way. By the light of the street lamp under which it stopped we could see that it held a piano and two persons beside the driver. The man was masked, and wore a soft felt hat and a velvet coat. He seated himself at the piano and played a Chopin waltz with decided sentiment and brilliancy; then, touching the keys idly for a moment or two, he struck a few chords of prelude and turned towards the woman who sat beside him. She rose, and, laying one hand on the corner of the instrument, began to sing one of the season's favourites, ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... patience was rewarded. He had carelessly taken up a paper-bound volume of Chopin, and was on the point of commenting upon it, for he had lately begun to understand the difference between a Litolff and a Mikuli. But it slipped from his hand, and he was obliged to crawl under the piano to pick it up; on a corner of the cover, in a big, black, scrawly writing, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to the piano. She played really well. Otherwise she would not have played to him, or to any one. She was specially at home in the music of Chopin, and had studied minutely many of the "Etudes." Now she began to play the Etude in E flat. As she played she felt that the intense nervous irritation which had possessed her was diminishing slightly, was becoming more bearable. She played several of the Etudes, and presently began ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Rosamund comes down-stairs in a bad temper—after you gentlemen have left," remarked Miss Georgie, significantly; and then she prattled away in this careful undertone. "What horrid stuff that fantasia is; don't you think so? A mixture of Wagner, and Chopin, and 'Home, Sweet Home.' Lady Adela has put you in her novel. Oh, yes, she has; she showed me the last pages this morning. You remember the young married English lady who is a great poetess?—well, she is rescued from drowning in the Bay of ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... them. Likewise, in modern methods of teaching to draw, the pupil is taught to see objects before painting them. In music, unfortunately, the same rule does not hold. Young people are taught to play the compositions of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt, before their minds and ears can grasp these works, before they have developed the faculty of being moved ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... croquet, Then she daintily dusted her face; Then she sprinkled herself with "Ess Bouquet," Fished out from the foregoing case; And we chattered of Gassier and Grisi, And voted Aunt Sally a bore; Discussed if the tight rope were easy, Or Chopin much ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... of 1831 that Liszt met Chopin in Paris. From the first, these two men, so different, became fast friends. Chopin's delicate, retiring soul found a singular delight in Liszt's strong and imposing personality. Liszt's exquisite perception enabled him perfectly to live in the strange dreamland of Chopin's fancies, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... wind wandering, forever grieves Low overhead, Above grey mosses whispering of leaves Fallen and dead. And through the lonely night sweeps their refrain Like Chopin's ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... draw, to their own hurt it may be, the secret of his love and make it their own; they look with new eyes on modern life, because they have listened to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or handled Greek things, or read the story of the passion of some dead man for some dead woman whose hair was like threads of fine gold, and whose mouth was as a pomegranate. But the sympathy of ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... gently, and his sorrows and his temptations faded from him. He glided into Bach, and then into Chopin and Mendelssohn, and at last drifted into dreamy improvisation, his fingers moving almost of themselves, his eyes, half closed, seeing only ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... appeared in his twelfth year, and soon his songs and two and four hand piano-pieces began to attract the attention of musicians. In 1840 Villoing took him to Paris and placed him in the Conservatory, where he attracted the attention of Liszt, Chopin, and Thalberg. He remained in that city eighteen months, devoting himself to unremitting study, and then made some professional tours, in which he met with extraordinary success, particularly in England. From that country he went to Holland ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... with humor. "I will listen with great pleasure; but don't ask a chemist to judge a pianist. I love music—it is a sweet noise in my ears—but I can hardly distinguish Chopin from Schumann." He faced the girl. "Play for me. I shall be very deeply indebted." As she still hesitated he added: "Please do, or I will certainly think you consider ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... charmed with immediately appellant melodies, resents, wearies of, or is deaf to the harmonies of a more remote, a more complex, and above all a more novel creative method. He is, among poets, what Wagner is among musicians; as Shakspere may be likened to Beethoven, or Shelley to Chopin. The common assertion as to his incapacity for metric music is on the level of those affirmations as to his not being widely accepted of the people, when the people have the chance; or as to the indifference of the public ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the piece that you played Is 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 ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... oppressed. Yes, and for the poets, the painters—the singers and the musicians, with their temperaments of genius, their loves, jealousies, and their shattered nerves. For upwards of six years she treated Chopin with a mother's care; she had the passion of maternity in her towards them all, with whatever feelings it may have been complicated in her life of manifold experiences and with her artist temperament. She may have leant heavily on it at times, it may have ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... revere their art? We are told of Chopin that art was for him a high and holy vocation.[8] Do you wonder? Let me read you a few words about his devotion: "In order to become a skilful and able master he studied, without dreaming of the ... fame he would obtain." "Nothing could be purer, more exalted, than his thoughts,"[9] because ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... sort of thing! But I mean other music, the hard things that papa likes. There is one of the Chopin nocturnes that Mrs. Duncan plays, oh, it is so beautiful! I wish you ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Chopin; and he rose and stood at the fireplace, with his hands folded behind his back. As she turned and looked at him, he ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... their mental pleasures, any more than a savage could delight in a nocturne of Chopin. Yet one was the intellectual ecstasy of a sublime intelligence, and the other the harmonious rapture of a divinely melodious soul. I must here mention that the processes of chemical experiment in Mizora differed materially from those I had known. ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... admit that you can't live on languages, they are not exactly safety-valves for the emotions; nobody can swear in more than three of them at a time. I think music's better. Instead of playing whist you ought to play Chopin." ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... in which noble tree-forms show sombre against a tumultuous sky—the latter an architectural mass of pale cloud, spanned by a vivid rainbow. Across the lower part of the picture is a scroll, on which are written, in musical notation, two bars from Chopin's Twentieth Prelude. At the top are the words, Studies in Harmony: it is an advertisement ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... as tired of hearing you, I dare say," was the retort. "It seems to me you always stumble when you play to the doctor, and he adores Chopin." ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... While Chopin probably did not time his "Minute Waltz" to exactly sixty seconds, some auditors insist that it lives up to its name. Mme. Theodora Surkow-Ryder on one of her tours played the "Minute Waltz" as an encore, first telling her audience what it was. Thereupon a huge man in a large riding ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... happened, I asked. Why, Pen, being on the Pincio, had fallen on the French troops, had pushed through, and heard 'l'ordre du jour' read, had made friends with 'ever so many captains,' had marched in the ranks round the Pincio and into the caserne, had talked a great deal about Chopin, Stephen Heller, &c., with musical officers, and most about politics, and had been good-naturedly brought back to our door because he was 'too little to come alone through the crowd.' What had they not told him? Such things ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... for an andante. At her solicitation he took her place at the instrument, and executed the andantino as few but professional artists could do. Mlle. Moiseney, ever ready with her enthusiasm, declared that he must be a Liszt or a Chopin, and implored him to play her something else, to which he consented with good grace. After this they talked about music and many other things. The man with the green eyes possessed one quality in common with Socrates, he was ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... and her smile in the moonlight reminded him of a rippling passage of Chopin. Prosaic enough, however, was what she went on to tell him of her struggle for life by day and for learning by night. 'Of course, I could only attend the night medical school. I lived by lining cloaks with fur; my bed was the corner ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... cowboy printed in it." The Story of a Ranch is listed here to illustrate how titles often have nothing to do with subject. It is without either story or ranch; it is about some dilettanteish people who go out to a Kansas sheep farm, talk Chopin, and wash their ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... she would enjoy boundless equanimity: she would raise her whole being to the level of her sublime passion. She would practise charity, humility, piety,—in fine, all the virtues: together with certain morceaux of Beethoven and Chopin. She would walk the earth like one glorified. She would do homage to the best of men by inviolate secrecy. Here, by I know not what gentle transition, as she lay in the quiet darkness, Elizabeth covered her pillow with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Mozley said that Chopin was "certainly a Manichean; he did not believe in God; he believed in some spirit, not in God;" while "the moral grandeur of Beethoven's genius was always present to him, as, with less force, was also Mendelssohn's: ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... If there is, let him be brought forward—not to be chucked out of the window, as Mrs. F.'s AUNT might suggest,—but to be thanked and wondered at as an inchoate OFFENBACH, who might, under other circumstances, have written an American opera-bouffe, or, better still, as a possible CHOPIN, who might have written a second "March Funebre" as hopeless and desolate and fascinating as that of the despairing and poetic Pole. (I am coming to "FRITZ" in a moment, but I won't be hurried ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... looks at the clouds. He plays truant from earth, slips through the wicket of fancy into heaven's meadow, and goes gathering stars. Here we have that absolute virgin-gold of song which is the scarcest among human products, and for which we can go to but three poets—Coleridge, Shelley, Chopin, {8} and perhaps we should add Keats. Christabel and Kubla-Khan; The Skylark, The Cloud, and The Sensitive Plant (in its first two parts). The Eve of Saint Agnes and The Nightingale; certain of the Nocturnes;—these ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... in the drawing-room, with the tea-tray between them, and agreed to end it. On the stage he would have risen and said, 'Well, the comedy is over, the tragedy begins, or the curtain falls;' and she would have gone to the piano and played Chopin sadly while he made his exit. Instead of which he got up to go without saying anything, and as he rose he upset a cup and saucer on the tea-table, and said, 'Oh, I beg your pardon;' and she said, 'It isn't broken;' and ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... parted but raised hair with an Alexandra curl on the left shoulder. In these vases folded slips of paper called spills were kept. A modern note was struck by the presence of a baby Grand—a jolly, clumsy, disproportioned youthful piano, rather like a colt, on which Daphne played Chopin to Mrs. Foster, and sometimes The Chocolate Soldier to Cyril; and Mrs. Foster, at twilight, sometimes played and even sang, "I cannot sing the old songs, they are too dear to me," which her mother used to sing, or, coming a little nearer to the present, "Ask nothing ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... course she had written some things of small value before this, but that wonderful book was really her introduction to the world. And it brought the whole literary world to her feet. Thereafter her friends were the first men of France. De Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, Michel, Alfred de Musset, Chopin, Liszt, Delacroix, Beranger, Sainte-Beuve, Gustave Planche, Mazzini, were her friends, her intimates, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... 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 ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... "Vous avez trouvé un titre assez laid pour faire reculer les divines étoiles." I know not what instrument to compare with his verse. I suppose I should say a flute; but it seems to me more like a marvellously toned piano. His hands pass over the keys and he produces Chopin-like fluidities. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the terrace overlooking the hotel gardens. In the salon a young Englishman, an accomplished musician, had been playing for some time on the piano, when suddenly and unexpectedly he plunged into the strains of Chopin's Marche Funebre, which had the immediate effect of scattering his audience, since many of his listeners, not caring for so melancholy a piece of music, deserted the room for the garden. Lucky indeed were those persons driven forth ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... from the need of it soon enough," promised the other. She crossed to the piano. "What kind of music do you want? No; don't tell me. I should be able to guess." Half turning on the bench she gazed speculatively at the lax figure on the rug. "Chopin, I think. I've guessed right? Well, I don't think I shall play you Chopin to-day. You don't need that kind ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... presently, but Marilyn was already at the piano playing softly a bit from the Angel Chorus, a snatch of Handel's Largo, a Chopin Nocturne, one of Mendelssohn's songs without words. The two came in hilariously, the young man pretending to lean heavily on the girl, and finding much occasion to hold her hands, a performance to which she seemed to be not at all ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... had soulful friends-refined Maiden Ladies with ideals and long noses, who live at Hampstead or Putney, and play Chopin with passion. On sad autumn afternoons I would go and have tea with them, and talk of the spiritual meaning of Beethoven's late Sonatas; or discuss in the twilight the pathos of life ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... this corner of the world and would never leave it. He had returned from Paris more than ever convinced that he was not fitted to live in Europe. Yet, mon ami, he ran away from here, and went to the savage Marquesas Islands, where he died in a few years. He loved the third etude of Chopin, and the andante of Beethoven's twenty-third sonata. You know music says things we would be almost afraid to put in words, if we could. If Flaubert might have written 'Madame Bovary' or 'Salambo' in musical notes, he would ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... amounting to $16,000, Mme. Sembrich sang an aria; then came upon the stage and played a violin obbligato to Mme. Nilsson's performance of the familiar Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria"; again she appeared and this time played a Chopin Mazourka on the pianoforte. In every instance she was the complete artist, and the public, who had been charmed by her witcheries as Mozart's Zerlina and melted by the pathos of her singing in the last act of "La Traviata," were at a loss to say if she had ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... waving 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 ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... The single notes of the opening motif of Chopin's Fifteenth Nocturne fell pensively into the waiting room. Miriam, her fatigue forgotten, slid to a featureless freedom. It seemed to her that the light with which the room was filled grew brighter and clearer. She felt ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... most cultivated judge of music. He greatly admires the masters of the eighteenth century, Domenico Scarlatti being his special favourite. But his most ardent devotion is reserved for Sebastian Bach. He does not care much for Chopin, and Beethoven affects him too profoundly ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... it with music, Beautiful music; Somehow they'd rather be kissed To the strains of Chopin or Liszt. A melody mellow played on a cello Helps Mister Cupid along— So say ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... many other good writers that it would require a volume to do them justice. We name only, by way of indicating the wide variety that awaits the reader, the charming stories of Grace King and writers Kate Chopin dealing with plantation life; the New England stories, powerful or brilliant or somber, of Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke and Mary E. Wilkins; the tender and cheery southern stories of Thomas Nelson Page; the impressive stories of mountaineer ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... he was quivering and the consequent irritation that followed came upon the kindly German, and, after his wont, he was caught up and borne above the world. On one sublime theme after another he executed variations, putting into them sometimes Chopin's sorrow, Chopin's Raphael-like perfection; sometimes the stormy Dante's grandeur of Liszt—the two musicians who most nearly approach Paganini's temperament. When execution reaches this supreme degree, the executant ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... unfortunate! May I most respectfully ask you to present my compliments to Alexandra Michailovna, and remind her... tell her, that with my whole heart I wish for her what she wished for herself on Thursday evening, while she was listening to Chopin's Ballade. She will remember. I wish it with all sincerity. General Ivolgin ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that affair: Sue and Roger had been engaged ten years before the time of which I am writing, they were within a few months of the wedding, and Frederick Paynter, her cousin, had come back from Germany, playing Chopin like a demi-god, and had whirled her off her feet in a fortnight. She broke off the engagement in a rather cruel way, it seemed to me—by telephone—and Roger hung up the receiver (I myself heard him answer slowly, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... select few, who hold communion in the love of classical quartet and trio music by the great masters,—in the piano poems of Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven, there will be abundant opportunities. The Mendelssohn Quintette Club, the German Trio, Mr. Satter, the pianist, and would we might add Otto Dresel, will give series of concerts in the pleasant Chickering Saloon, that holds two hundred. Alas! we may be disappointed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... bright, piquant, genial, affectionate; nor is it enough to speak of their artistic worth, the subtile appreciation of painting in the first series, and of music in the second; it is not enough to refer to the glimpses which they give of eminent artists,—Chopin, Rossini, Donizetti, Hiller, and Moscheles,—nor the side-glances at Thorwaldsen, Bunsen, the late scholarly and art-loving King of Prussia, Schadow, Overbeck, Cornelius, and the Duesseldorf painters; nor is it enough to dwell upon that delightful homage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... recovered all their strength and agility, raising her eyes to heaven like Saint Cecilia, played the "Prayer of Moses in Egypt," which her son had bought for her and which she had learned by heart in a few hours. Godefroid recognized in her playing the same quality as in Chopin's. The soul was satisfied by divine sounds of which the dominant note was that of tender melancholy. Monsieur Bernard had received Godefroid with a look that was long a stranger to his eyes. If tears were not forever dried at their source, withered by such scorching sorrows, that ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... an atelier where a number of art and music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, Rembrandt's works, pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin and Oolong. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... I was swimming back, staring at her eyes, it came over me that there had been hyacinths on the piano, almost overpowering in the dusk of the room that will always be nearest to me—I hope I may lie there, dead. I was playing Chopin, and life looked so rich: the boy was not born yet. I said, "If he should die"—but of course I couldn't believe that he would. And then—and then it was as if he had not died, after all, and I saw that this had ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... enough to stand it, but the domestic article suits me. I like the kind of beer that this man Bach turned out in the spring of the year, but I don't seem to be able to care much for his music. And so far as Chopin is concerned, I hope you'll all do your Christmas ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... addicted to formulating instructive matter as to the accomplishment of paintings and frescoes; that Thackeray or Dickens or Meredith or George Sand were known to have answered inquiries as to 'How to write a Novel'; or that Beethoven or Wagner or Chopin or Mendelsohn paused in the midst of their careers in order to tell newspaper men what they considered the true method of composing music. These fortunate people—as well as others of their time—could so easily be silent and thus avoid disclosing the fact that they could not—for ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... listen he heard the young woman trying to play one of Chopin's nocturnes, and not ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... sad and when New Year's Day came Effi began to grow quite melancholy. It was not cold, only grizzly and rainy, and if the days were short, the evenings were so much the longer. What was she to do! She read, she embroidered, she played solitaire, she played Chopin, but nocturnes were not calculated to bring much light into her life, and when Roswitha came with the tea tray and placed on the table, beside the tea service, two small plates with an egg and a Vienna cutlet ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... to the memory of Pitt conveys an impression alike of heroic endeavour and of irretrievable failure. It is the Funeral March of Chopin, not of Handel, and it echoes the feeling of the time. An impenetrable darkness hung over England. Ulm, Austerlitz, the armistice, and the desertion of the Allies by Prussia were successive waves of calamity, which obliterated ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Feodor during an evening call he interned him in the vitals of a tuneless Baby Grand, and for three hours played on him CHOPIN'S polonaise in A flat major, with the loud pedal down. On his release Feodor had lost his reason and rushed to the nearest police-station to ask to be sent to the Front immediately. His object, he explained, was to end the War. The Bulgar authorities thought the plan worth ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... life" and gave her a nom de guerre; the inscrutable Merimee, who made no one happy; Musset—an encounter from which both tiger-moths escaped with singed wings; the odd transitional figure of Pagello; Michel Euraed; Liszt; Chopin, whom she loved and nursed for eight years; her master Lamennais; her master Pierre Leroux; her father-confessor Sainte-Beuve; and Gustave Flaubert, the querulous friend of her ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... does not insist on acting when the difficult thing is not to act. In "Tartuffe" Coquelin stands motionless for five minutes at a time, without change of expression, and yet nothing can be more expressive than his face at those moments. In Chopin's G Minor Nocturne, Op. 15, there is an F held for three bars, and when Rubinstein played the Nocturne, says Mr. Huneker in his instructive and delightful book on Chopin, he prolonged the tone, "by some miraculous ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... times, too thin to attract the sympathy or to excite the interest of pianists of the present day, who enjoy the richer inheritance of Beethoven, the romantic tone-pictures of Schumann and Brahms, the fascinating miniatures of Chopin, and the clever glitter of Liszt. Still it does not deserve utter oblivion. Hear what Fr. Rochlitz says of it in the Allg. Mus. Zeit.: "It (the sonata) is indeed a tragic scene, one so clearly thought out and so definitely expressed, that it is by no ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... other people. Oh! I can do it 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)
... sound of band music, and down the road, outside the high wire fence, a little procession led by soldiers in gray-blue, playing Chopin's "Funeral March." Behind them came the hospital hearse, priests, and a weeping peasant family. The little procession moved slowly behind the wailing trumpets—it was an honor given to all who ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... you are very much in earnest: that speaks well for you, and for Mr. Buffalo. But what pieces are you studying with the Etudes? Hummel, Mendelssohn, Chopin, or Schumann? ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... made so miserable by Chopin's Marche funebre. Try two of Schubert's songs, "Ich unglueckselige Atlas" and "Du schoenes Fischermaedchen"—they are very jolly. I have read aloud my death-cycle from Walt Whitman this evening. I was very much affected myself, never so much before, and it fetched the auditory ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cantaloupe moon, full of yellow radiance, arose as we listened to the melancholy fall of the water on the muddy flats, and I said to Piloti, "Come, let us go within; there you will play for me some tiny questioning Chopin prelude, and forget this dolorous night." ... He had been staring hard at the moon when I aroused him. "As you will; let us go indoors by all means, for this moon gives me the spleen." Then we moved slowly ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... native land, Poland. Like Goethe or Stendhal, Conrad can write in the midst of war's alarums about the hair's-breadth 'scapes of his characters. But, then, the Polish is the most remarkable race in Europe; from leading forlorn hopes to playing Chopin the Poles are unequalled. Mr. Conrad has returned to his old habitat in fiction. An ingenious map shows the reader precisely where his tragic tale is enacted. It may not be his most artistic, but ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... tend to eliminate many of the great geniuses of the world who were not only "Bohemian," but actually and pathologically abnormal—men like Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Poe, Schumann, Nietzsche, Comte, Guy de Maupassant,—and how many others? But such considerations should not lead us into error of concluding that such men were geniuses merely because they were pathological specimens, and that the only way to produce a genius is to breed disease and defect. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... 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 vary that noble masterpiece ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... her across the hall, and entered the room with her. Sir Allan, with his back to them, was seated at the piano, softly playing an air of Chopin's to himself. At the sound of the opening door, he ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as at a fair, he assembled the mangled masterpieces of Bach, Gluck, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and to a gullible public sold the songs of these music-lords—songs that should swim on high like great swan-clouds cleaving skies blue and inaccessible. And his music was operatic, after all, grand opera saccharine ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the piano and began mechanically to play scales, but the somnolent monotony of the tones only added to her nervousness. Later she played some of Chopin's Nocturnes, lingered over those mysterious tones that seemed like strains from another world, full of tears, pain, cries of anguish, and bleak despair; the radiance of cold moonlight nights, moans like the whisper of ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont |
