"Bach" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... popular air in which all would vocally join, he would soon glide like a spirit of melody to the unprofaned height of the music masters. Bach was his favorite. And when, with the mute, to soften the waves from unfriendly ears, he would interpret some symphony of the soul, we would forget our grim surroundings and dream we "dwelt in ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... upon 'nationality' and 'method,' we get what is called a Cross-division, thus 'German Musicians.' 'Not-German,' 'Classical,' 'Not-Classical;' for these classes may overlap, the same men sometimes appearing in two groups—Bach in 'German' and 'Classical,' Pergolesi in 'Not-German' and 'Classical.' If, however, we divide Musicians upon these attributes successively, cross division will ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... who loved music was not a composer. Returning from one of Mozart's grand operas, splendidly performed at the Royal Theatre, he looked over his own, played a few of the best parts, sat staring at the busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly he tore up his music sheets, one by one, and as the last fluttered out of his hand, he said soberly ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... one of Herne's company of players in Shore Acres, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... your Diddler lives and flourishes among them like a fighting cock. Diddler's "heyday" being over, he next becomes a politician—an old Hunker; attends caucusses and conventions, dinners and inaugurations. Never aspiring to matrimony among the ladies, he remains an "old bach;" never hoping for office under government, he never gets any; and when, at last, both youth and energies are wasted, Diddler dons a white neckcloth, combs his few straggling hairs behind his ears, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... were unlike any previously experienced. A true child prodigy, he began composing at age 5 and rapidly developed his unmistakable style; by 18 he was composing works capable of altering the mind-states of entire civilizations. Indeed, he and his predecessor Bach accomplished the Olympian feat of adding to the human concepts of civility and civilization. So these two were not just musical geniuses, but geniuses of ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... crescent. That the world should know Marlowe and Giorgione, Raphael and Mozart, only by the products of their early manhood, is indeed a cause for lamentation, when we remember what the long lives of a Bach and Titian, a Michelangelo and Goethe, held in reserve for their maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade ourselves, as some have done, that we possess the best work of men untimely slain. Had Sophocles been cut off in his prime, before the composition ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... who was choirmaster and musical director at St. Thomas's Church, held at that time this important and ancient post which was afterwards occupied by Schicht, and before him by no less a person than Sebastian Bach. By education he belonged to the old Italian school of music, and had studied in Bologna under Pater Martini. He had made a name for himself in this art by his vocal compositions, in which his fine manner of treating the parts was much praised. He himself told me ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... impression left upon the mind of the reader is, that his powers showed themselves suddenly in full splendor, and that at a single bound he placed himself at the head of the dramatic composers of his age. This was not true of Hasse, Mozart, Gluck, Cherubini, Weber, in dramatic composition; nor of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, in other branches of the musical art. However great a man's genius may be, he must live and learn. To attain the highest excellence, long continued study is necessary; and Handel, as we believe, was no exception ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... feelings and emotions, before giving him the power of describing 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 ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... as unpremeditated, its direction and development as unbiassed by theories, its votaries as untroubled with self-consciousness, as if they had been archaic sculptors or builders of the thirteenth century. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, what sublime unconsciousness of their own personality as the personality of artists and as influencing art! Does Richard Wagner seem at first sight to be a glaring exception to such a rule—seem to strive more than any other artist in any branch of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Daito Islands Japan Dakar [US Embassy] Senegal Daman (Damao) India Damascus [US Embassy] Syria Danger Atoll Cook Islands Danish Straits Atlantic Ocean Danzig (Gdansk) Poland Dao Bach Long Vi Vietnam Dardanelles Atlantic Ocean Dar es Salaam [US Embassy] Tanzania Davis Strait Atlantic Ocean Deception Island Antarctica Denmark Strait Atlantic Ocean D'Entrecasteaux Islands Papua New Guinea Devon Island Canada Dhahran ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... speech is the meaning of one of Bach's fugues or Claude Monet's effects of sunlight? One cannot say. They appeal direct to the soul. So does a subtle harmony of words, using words as notes of music, or pigments, what you will, arranged by the magic of a master. These things ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... itself by instinct. Man is only what he becomes—profound truth; but he becomes only what he is, truth still more profound. What am I? Terrible question! Problem of predestination, of birth, of liberty, there lies the abyss. And yet one must plunge into it, and I have done so. The prelude of Bach I heard this evening predisposed me to it; it paints the soul tormented and appealing and finally seizing upon God, and possessing itself of peace and the infinite with ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... larger measure to the inherited effects of daily exercise of the musical faculty by their fathers, than to inheritance, with increase, of spontaneous variations; and whether the diffused musical powers of the Bach clan, culminating in those of Johann Sebastian, did not result in part from constant practice; but I will raise the more general question—How came there that endowment of musical faculty which characterizes modern ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... is all rubbish," the German would cry, after spending an hour in going through some trashy modern Italian music. "Now, my child, you shall hear something worth listening to;" and with a sigh of relief he would turn to some old piece by Mozart or Bach, some minuet of Haydn's, some romance of Beethoven's, which he would play with no great power of execution, indeed, but with a rare sweetness and delicacy of touch and expression, and with an intense absorption in the music, which communicated itself ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... same exaltation of mind, the same intellectual transport, which the trained musician feels when listening to the celestial harmonies of a great orchestra. In proportion as one conceives, or can imagine, the fineness of the musical endowment of a Bach or Beethoven, and in proportion as he can realize in his own mind the infinity of training and preparation which has contributed to the development of such a master musician—in such proportion may he comprehend and appreciate ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... said Phoebe, who rather piqued herself upon her music, and who was learned in Bach and Beethoven, and had an opinion of her own about Wagner. Mrs. Tom brightened visibly, for her girls played not a ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the Winkle, and the Winkle out of the Quangle-Wangle. You will note also that the Yorkshire and Durham mind is balanced between the two views of its being a crow or a magpie. I am content myself to be in harmony with France and Italy, in my 'Merula,' and with Germany in my Torrent-Ouzel. Their 'bach' (as in Staubbach, Giesbach, Reichenbach) being essentially a mountain waterfall; and their 'amsel,' as our Damsel, merely the Teutonic form of the Demoiselle or Domicilla—'House-Ouzel,' as it were, (said of a nice girl)—Domicilla again being, I think, merely the transposition of Ancilla ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... School holds up an ideal. It plasters its walls with busts of Walt Whitman and Blake; it hangs bad reproductions of Botticelli round the walls; it sings songs to Freedom; it rhapsodises about Beethoven and Bach. The children of the Crank Schools are, I rejoice to say, not cranks. They leave the boredom of Bach and seek the jazz record on the gramophone; they ignore the pictures of Whitman and Blake and study The Picture Show or Funny Bits. ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... those other definitions that express one art in terms of another: poetry in terms of painting, and painting in terms of poetry. "Architecture is frozen music" does not enable us to understand either perpendicular Gothic or a fugue of Bach; and when an historian defines history in terms of philosophy, or a philosopher philosophy in terms of history, you may be on the lookout for sophistication. Your philosophical historian points his moral by adorning his tale. Your historical ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... single moment! Permit me to—er—explain. The whole thing, the—er—situation reminds me, demn me, of most amusing incident at Sacramento in '52. Large party at Hank Suedecois: know Hank? Confirmed old bach of sixty. Dinner for forty. Everything in style, first families, Ged,—Judge Beeswinger, Mat Boompointer, and Maje Blodgett of Ahlabam: know old Maje Blodgett? Well, Maje was there. Ged, sir, delay,—everybody waiting. I went to Hank. "Hank," I says, "what's matter? why delay?"—"Star," ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... outbound car, and ere she descended from it she had conned the conversation over and over again. "But how?" she repeated to herself, as she climbed the three flights of stairs to the rooms where she and her sister "bach'ed." "But how?" And so she continued to put the interrogation, for the stubborn Scotch blood, though many times removed from Scottish soil, was still strong in her. And, further, there was need that she should ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... Bach and his fugues—emotional mathematics, all of them! Of what avail the decorative efforts of tonal fresco painters, breeders of an hour's pleasure, soon forgotten in the grave's muddy disdain! Had not the stage lowered music ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of you to condemn me to this ugliness. I want only to read my books and hear a few simple fugues by Bach." ...
— Droozle • Frank Banta
... to him,' as you genteelly put it," Mr Sharnall said one evening, when Lord Blandamer had gone. "I can't stop his giving new bellows or a new pedal-board. And we do want the new board and the additional pipes. As it is, I can't play German music, can't touch a good deal of Bach's organ work. Who is to say this man nay, if he chooses to alter the organ? But I'm not going to truckle to anyone, and least of all to him. Do you want me to fall flat on my face because he is a lord? Pooh! we could ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... as a new-born child, Thy heart would never once admit E'en wholesome rigour to thy wit; 170 Thy head, if Conscience should comply, Its kind assistance would deny, And lend thee neither force nor art To drive it onward to the heart. Oh, may thy sacred power control Bach fiercer working of my soul, Damp every spark of genuine fire, And languors, like thine own, inspire! Trite be each thought, and every line As moral and as dull as thine! 180 Poised in mid-air—(it matters not ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... he would not have to rise when anyone wished to pass in front of him. He liked to arrive a few minutes before the concert commenced, and one of us would read the program to him. He had an excellent memory for music, and his taste was broad enough to embrace almost everything good from Bach to Wagner. He was a keen critic of a performance, and in the intervals between the pieces he criticized the playing from the standpoint of ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... talk of music, She is Music's devotee. She will tell you that Beethoven Always makes her wish to pray; And "dear old Bach!" His very name She says, her ear enchants; But— Her favorite piece is Weber's ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... think again. Tommy ain't so old; and it seems to me every man's a bach-e-lor until he gets married. Now, you'd think Tommy'd be fairly bustin' with joy, and maybe he is; I don't know. But he goes around singing all them mournful songs, and, say, you'd ought to hear him singing. Oh, gee! Honest, Lucien, the fog horn over on the ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... no less than eight private concerts during those six weeks, and heard the same new ballad, and the same latest gavotte in C minor, at everyone of them. She was taken to pianoforte recitals in fashionable squares and streets, and heard Bach and Beethoven till her heart ached with pity for the patient labour of the performers, knowing how poorly she and the majority of mankind appreciated their efforts. She went to a few dances that were rather amusing, and waltzed ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... for nothin' could ha' made that seem right to me, arter all had come and gone. But I jest thought how James was a dretful handy man about the house, an' I knew he set by Cap'n Fuller. The Cap'n 'ain't no real home, you know, an' I thought they'd admire to bach it together." ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... the fine arts I am very susceptible, and I have given a great deal of time to this study. I am devoted heart and soul to music, which is more and more to me every year I live. Trivial or light music I cannot endure, but of Beethoven, Bach, Haendel, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, and Wagner I should never hear enough. Here, too, my sympathies, are very catholic, and I delight in McDowell, Debussy, Richard ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... he passed. The minister from Iowa who was to preach on the Sabbath stopped to exchange greetings, a friend dropped into a vacant chair for a talk. Then the music stands were set up and the band assembled around them and for an hour we listened to selections from Wagner and Bach, varied with the martial strains of Sousa or the melodies of Foster. The stewards brought out a table, filled it with dishes, and served bouillon and biscuit, while near by a kodak ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... For all that we speak of the sacrosanct uniqueness of a given art work, we know very well, though we do not always admit it, that not all productions are equally intractable to transference. A Chopin etude is inviolate; it moves altogether in the world of piano tone. A Bach fugue is transferable into another set of musical timbres without serious loss of esthetic significance. Chopin plays with the language of the piano as though no other language existed (the medium "disappears"); ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... that, though some records of his out-pourings as a talker exist, very little is on record that possesses permanent value. Perhaps the best word that can be quoted is that remembered by Sir James Paget—Browning's recommendation of Bach's "Crucifixus—et sepultus—et resurrexit" as a cure for want of belief. He did not fling such pointed shafts as those of Johnson which still hang and almost quiver where they struck. His energy did not gather itself up into sentences but flowed—and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... news to Phyllis, and they planned an elaborate program. It was an evening that they long remembered, so absorbed were they in the music that they all loved. And it was not till the end of an ensemble rendering of a Bach concerto, that some one remarked, ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... discipline, he loves them only the more. His delight is to find examples of them in the great and admired musicians, and to take them to his grandfather or his master. His grandfather replies that in the great musicians they are admirable, and that Beethoven and Bach can take any liberty. His master, less conciliatory, is angry, and says acidly that the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the snows of a thousand winters have lent depth and power. The measure of greatness in a man is determined by the intellectual streams and moral tides flowing down from the ancestral hills and emptying into the human soul. The Bach family included one hundred and twenty musicians. Paganini was born with muscles in his wrists like whipcords. What was unique in Socrates was first unique in Sophroniscus. John ran before Jesus, but Zacharias foretold John. No electricity along rope wires, and no ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... descriptions of several works which are not oratorios in the strict sense, but at the same time are sacred compositions written upon a large scale and usually performed by oratorio societies, such as Bach's "Passion Music" and "Magnificat," Berlioz's, Mozart's, and Verdi's Requiems, Mendelssohn's "Hymn of Praise," Handel's "Dettingen Te Deum," Schumann's "Paradise and the Peri," and Rubinstein's ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... amateur who has not made a very profound study of harmony, and sings his pretty song to his simple accompaniment with so sweet and true a natural voice that we are charmed. It is the magic of nature, whereas Keene is a very Sebastian Bach in his counterpoint. There is nothing of the amateur about him; his knowledge of harmony in black and white is complete and thorough; mere consummate scoring has become to him a second nature; each separate note of his voice reveals the long training of the professional singer; and if his ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... feed his flock," which it suggests by similarity of subject, though not by similarity of treatment; but in a certain quality of inwardness, or religious meditativeness, it reminds one more of Mr. Paine's favourite master, Bach. The choral, like the one in the first part and the one which follows the scene of Pentecost, is taken from the Lutheran Choral Book, and arranged with original harmony and instrumentation, in accordance with the custom of Bach, Mendelssohn, and other composers, "of introducing into their ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... "Still an old bach." He looked at Flaxen, irresistibly drawn to her face. She dropped her eyes; she could not have ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... things are as they used to be; the honest Zywny is the soul of all our amusements." Sowinski informs us that Zywny taught his pupil according to the classical German method—whatever that may mean—at that time in use in Poland. Liszt, who calls him "an enthusiastic student of Bach," speaks likewise of "les errements d'une ecole entierement classique." Now imagine my astonishment when on asking the well-known pianoforte player and composer Edouard Wolff, a native of Warsaw, [Fooynote: He died at Paris on October 16, 1880.] what kind ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... drinkin', an' allers gets stubborn in direct proportion to what licker he tucks onder his belt—'all the same, Dan, as to this yere spellin', I proposes to ask for kyards. Even if I ain't no Bach'lor of Arts, so long as the Doc don't fire nothin' at me worse'n words of one syllable, an' don't send 'em along faster than two at a clatter, your Uncle Monte'll get thar, collars creakin', ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... "Mozart and Bach have given me belief that not even the subversive impotencies of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the terribly obvious 'mysteries' of Dr. A. C. Mackenzie, have been able to take ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... ought you to treat her? Unless you are an ingrate infinite you will treat her well. You will treat her better than any one in the universe except your God. Her name will have in it more music than in all that Chopin, or Bach, or Rheinberger composed. Her eyes, swollen with three weeks of night watching over a child with scarlet fever, will be to you beautiful as a May morning. After the last rose petal has dropped out of her cheek, after the last feather of the raven's wing has fallen from her hair, after across ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... places of entertainment Mrs. Pallinson cherished a shuddering aversion. But there were occasional morning and evening "recitals," or concerts, where the music for the most part was of a classical and recondite character—feasts of melody, at which long-buried and forgotten sonatas of Gluck, or Bach, or Chembini were introduced to a discriminating public for the first time; and to these Mrs. Pallinson and Theobald conducted poor Adela Branston, whose musical proclivities had never yet soared into higher regions than those occupied by the sparkling joyous genius of Rossini, and to whom the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... 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 ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... music, he thought that Bach, "immortal though many of his works are," was fettered by his servitude ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... present or past. His songs are a mine of melody, surpassed in wealth only by Schubert's, and that only because there are more of Schubert's. In originality of harmony and modulation he has only six equals: Bach, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt. In rythmic invention and combination he is inexhaustible, and as orchestrator he ranks among the most fascinating. To speak of such a man—seven-eighths of whose works are still music of the future—as a ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... not to say Beethoven and Wagner, without acquaintance with the vocabulary and grammar of the wonderful language in which they wrote. Familiarity with the traditions of different schools of composition and performance is necessary also in order not to sing the songs of Bach and Handel like those of Schubert and Schumann, or Brahms like the modern French composers; in order not to interpret with like effects indiscriminately songs of the oratorio and opera, of Italian, German, French, English and modern ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... poetry of the school and the poetry of nature compare the faultless English and elegant sweetness of the Idylls of the King with the vigorous and expressive, but often ungrammatical, prose of Mallory, or compare Virgil with Homer, Horace with Sappho, a chorale by Mendelssohn with a chorale by Bach. Or compare a modern refrain dragged in for no other reason than because the poet has felt that the form requires a refrain of some kind and has tried to find one that is suitable—compare such a refrain by Morris ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... letters; Mozart but one. Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Saint-Saens, Sullivan, Charles Salaman, Edward Solomon, Frederic Cowen, run "n"-wards with the unanimity of publishers, while Gounod, Stanford, Audran, Sebastian Bach, Donizetti, work in the "n" otherwise, and Wagner has the librettist's "r" in addition. Would you play the piano? You must have the "n" of the piano, like Pachmann, Rubinstein, Rosenthal, Hofmann, Frederick ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Smoky, "and an old bach. He wants a live young man to take aholt with his ranch, and a live young woman to run the shebang. If I ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Out, out: My Lords, and please you, 'tis not so I did beget her, all the Parish knowes: Her Mother liueth yet, can testifie She was the first fruite of my Bach'ler-ship ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of art and did not understand it. I went to concerts, but the only part of a sonata or symphony which took hold of me was that which was melodious. The long passages with no striking theme in them conveyed nothing to me, and as to Bach, excepting now and then, his music was like a skilful recitation of nonsense verses. The Marseillaise on a barrel-organ was intelligible, but gymnastics on strings—what did they represent? With pictures the case was somewhat different. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... signature of many of the best-known Russian Socialists, representing all the Socialist factions and groups except the Bolsheviki. Among the names were those of George Plechanov, Leo Deutsch, Gregory Alexinsky, N. Avksentiev, B. Vorovonov, I. Bunakov, and A. Bach—representing the best thought of the movement in practically all its phases. This document is of the greatest historical importance, not merely because it expressed the sentiments of Socialists of so many shades, but even more because of its carefully reasoned arguments ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... flat, such as the Et incarnatus and the Agnus Dei, must have strongly appealed to him. His thoughts often went toward religious music, and it was easy for him to compose in this style. He recognized the mass as one of the great art-forms, equal to the oratorio or the opera. From Bach's time on, it may indeed be said to have been regarded in this light. It is quite evident that Bach so considered it when composing his grand mass in B minor, which in difficulty of execution, as well as in its extraordinary length, is no longer practicable as ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... as well demand of a music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach. ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Emerson is neither a classic or romantic but both—and both not only at different times in one essay, but at the same time in one sentence—in one word. And must we admit it, so is everyone. If you don't believe it, there must be some true definition you haven't seen. Chopin shows a few things that Bach forgot—but he is not eclectic, they say. Brahms shows many things that Bach did remember, so he is an eclectic, they say. Leoncavallo writes pretty verses and Palestrina is a priest, and Confucius inspires Scriabin. A choice is freedom. Natural selection ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... best music. "When Americans," he said, "shall have learned the supreme value and glory of the orchestra, . . . then I look to see America the home of the orchestra, and to hear everywhere the profound messages of Beethoven and Bach to men." And again: "All the signs of the times seem to point to this country as the scene of the future development of music. . . . It only needs direction, artistic atmosphere, and technique in order ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... of modern German literature there was a unique development in music, beginning with Sebastian Bach and continuing through the great classical school, the leading names in which are Glueck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, etc. The middle period of the nineteenth century showed a further development in prose literature, producing some of ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... doctrine that, whatever the universe may be, all we can know of it is the picture presented to us by consciousness. This picture may be a true likeness—though how this can be is inconceivable; or it may have no more resemblance to its cause than one of Bach's fugues has to the person who is playing it; or than a piece of poetry has to the mouth and lips of a reciter. It is enough for all the practical purposes of human existence if we find that our trust in the representations of ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... took the name of Caesar. After the death of Nero, this name designated the Imperial dignity itself, and afterwards the appointed successor. The time at which it was employed in the latter sense, cannot be fixed with certainty. Bach (Hist. Jurisprud. Rom. 304) affirms from Tacitus, H. i. 15, and Suetonius, Galba, 17, that Galba conferred on Piso Lucinianus the title of Caesar, and from that time the term had this meaning: but these two historians simply say that he appointed Piso his successor, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... seen him wending his way across the garden with his lantern from la grande maison, where he had been spending the evening with Madame, did we hear Monsieur playing on his organ glorious "bits" of Cherubini and Bach. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... State governments it is proper to observe, first, that the territory contemplated by the Constitution belongs to each State in its separate character and not to the United States in their aggregate character. Bach State holds territory according to its original charter, except in cases where cessions have been made to the United States by individual States. The United States had none when the Constitution was adopted which had not been thus ceded to them and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... cornice which form the termination of the height or upward progress of an architectural design. The analogy is here very close. A less close analogy may also be felt between an architectural and a musical composition regarded as a whole. A fugue of Bach's is really a built-up structure of tones (as Browning has so finely put it in his poem, "Abt Vogler"), in accordance with certain ideas of relation and proportion, just as a temple or a cathedral is a built-up structure of lines and spaces in accordance ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... sometimes strumous swellings, and the unnatural abdominal enlargement which accompanies disease of mesenteric glands, gives a very sad, and often a most unnatural, appearance to the sufferer." Professor Rhys' description of a reputed changeling, one Ellis Bach, of Nant Gwrtheyrn, in Carnarvonshire, is instructive as showing the kind of being accredited among the Welsh with fairy nature. The professor is repeating the account given to him of this poor creature, who died nearly half a century ago. He tells us: "His father was a farmer, whose children, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... mentioned above it is significant that so little has been attempted in the way of alteration or improvement, and it is still more so that of that little such a small proportion is worthy of a second thought. As Bach stands in relation to the fugue, as Beethoven to the symphony and Stradivari to the violin, so is Tourte to the bow. Superior alike to his predecessors and successors, he stands high poised upon the pedestal of ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... turn, if not a blind, at any rate a short-sighted eye towards a great composer's occasional realistic escapades, which, however irritating they may perhaps be to others, are to him only a part of the general background of his texture; after all, in their different media, Bach and most of the other giants have occasionally allowed themselves similar little flings. It is a question not of rights, but of powers. The poet and the painter and the novelist, not to mention all the non-human agents in the universe, are bound to do a good many things much ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... beautiful idea which appears in 'Tannhaeuser,' of associating a certain instrument or group of instruments with one particular character. The idea itself, it may be noticed in passing, dates from the time of Bach, who used the strings of the orchestra to accompany the words of Christ in the Matthew Passion, much as the old Italian painters surrounded his head with a halo. In 'Lohengrin' Wagner used this beautiful idea more systematically than in 'Tannhaeuser'; ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... divinely; he generally extemporised before the service, and played a simple piece at the end; but he never strained the resources of the little organ, and it was all simple and formal music, principally Bach or Handel. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it lies in a green valley, rich with many flowers; a lovely little brook runs through it, disappearing suddenly under houses to reappear again triumphant farther down the road. This brook is called the Silber Bach or Silver Brook, on account of the clearness of its water. On either side of the valley rise up steep mountain-slopes with wild woods and rough pathways. One good road joins the village with Vockenhausen, and so with the well-known town ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... time he first met Jenny he was clear of Wagner, had glanced a little patronisingly at Beethoven, turned aside and enwrapped himself in the sombre splendour of Bach, right away from the world; then, harking back, with a fresh vision, a sudden sense of the inevitable, had anchored himself in the solemn, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... at the Opera have been prodigious. and a new opera by Bach(748) last night, was so crowded, that there were ladies standing behind the scenes during the whole performance. Adieu! my dear lord: as this goes by a private hand, you may possibly ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... have sometimes been Indians and indeed almost any one may appear as a control—Longfellow, for example, or Mrs. Siddons, or Bach or Vanderbilt. In a region where disproof and proof are equally impossible this element of capricious control is suspicious. It is much more likely to be some obscure casting up of the medium's mind, through lines of association of which the medium is utterly unconscious, ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... of Bach's solos, Beethoven's concertos and quartets, he has no rival, and for the revival of many great works the musical world is indebted to him. Of these, one instance may be cited, viz., the violin concerto (Op. 61) of Beethoven, which was first played by Clement, December 23, 1806. This concerto ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... Maryland. Even General Schenck's order admits him to vote, if he recants upon oath. I think that is cheap enough. My order in Missouri, which you approve, and General Scherick's order here, reach precisely the same end. Bach assures the right of voting to all loyal men, and whether a man is loyal, each allows that man to fix by his own oath. Your suggestion that nearly all the candidates are loyal, I do not think quite meets the case. ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... when you once investigate! All the white-clad, ghostly spirits turn out to be clothes on the line. I suppose there's some equally natural explanation about your way on the piano—the clear, limpid phrasing of that Bach the other day, and then the color of the Bizet afterwards. It's astonishing to hear anybody of your crude youth playing Bach at all—and then to hear it played right—and afterwards to hear a modern given ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... to me you got mighty familiar," said Obed in a jocular tone. "She didn't tell me what her name was. I suppose she looked upon me as a dried-up old bach." ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... during supper it became really too bad. "What may it have cost? three ducats? must you have permission to wear it? Do you pay extra for leave to do so? We really must get one just like it." An officer there of the name of Bach, said, "For shame! what would you do with the cross?" That young ass, Kurzen Mantl, winked at him, but I saw him, and he knew that I did. A pause ensued, and then he offered me snuff, saying, "There, show that you don't care a pinch of ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... of Germany. He remembered—none better—the debt we owe to her learning and her art; to Bach and Beethoven, to Handel, the "dear Saxon" who adopted our citizenship; to Mendelssohn, who regarded England as his second home; to her fairy tales and folk-lore; to the Brothers Grimm and the Struwwelpeter; to the old kindly Germany which has been driven ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... by him in his music. He wants nothing while he has this. He thinks the musician's life the highest life. He says those to whom the revelations of God were committed were musicians. As David and Isaiah received inspiration to the strains of the harp, so, he says, have Bach and Mozart, Handel and Haydn, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. And where, indeed," she continued, in a musing tone, half soliloquizing, "where, indeed, can man rise so near heaven as when he listens to the inspired strains of ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... matter of mercy, say something in defence of those who cannot understand or win emotions from such things as classical music or the "advanced" drama. Pray, in pity's name, what is to be said against the commonplace man who hears an accomplished musician play Beethoven, Bach, or Chopin in his—the commonplace one's—drawing-room, and who says in agony, "Very fine! Very deep! Very profound—profound indeed, sir! Full of breadth and symmetry and that sort of thing! Now do you think we might ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... and no doubt attributes the perfidy of England to the popularity of our works. And as we have to take the Kaiser as we find him, and not as the Hohenzollern legend glorifies him, I have to take the Tsar as I find him. When we fight the Kaiser we are not fighting Bach and Wagner and Strauss, to whom we have just joyfully surrendered without a blow at the battle of Queen's Hall, but all the forces in Germany that made things hard for Wagner and Strauss. And when we fight for the Tsar we are not fighting for Tolstoy and Gorki, but for the ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... means of a plectrum held in the hand, the plectrum was set in motion by the mechanism of the claves or keys. The system of fingering employed in playing the harpsichord, up to 1700, did not make use of the thumb. J.S. Bach, F. Couperin, and J.P. Rameau were the pioneers in this matter. The first published work on piano technique and fingering was that ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... 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. Embarrassed, ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... afford it." He was rather near or so, you know, was my poor Griffey; but I never was letting him rest day or night, and the only thing he wasn't liking was being much talked over. So says I, "Come you, Jinkins, bach,"—he liked to be called by his sirname—"if you do larn Howel well, he'll be making his fortune some day," for he do say so, he do be always saying, "I'll be a great man, and get as much money as father." I eused to put in ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... ears, but then continued to write.... "And then his confounded flute! He is playing on it just now ... that means we are all to dance to his piping. But still worse than the flute is something which they call a fugue; I do not know whether one can call it music, but yesterday Sebastian Bach was here—'the great Bach' of course—and had his son Philipp Emanuel with him. The whole afternoon they played so-called fugues, so that I had to go to bed and take medicine. As regards his plans, I will only indicate some of them. One plan ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... that its vast rim had the fine artistic effect of a huge saintly nimbus: Mr. BUMSTEAD sat gynmastically crosswise in an easy-chair, over an arm of which his slender lower limbs limply dangled, and elaborately performed one of the grander works of BACH upon an irritable accordion. Now, winking with intense rapidity, and going through the muscular motions of an excitable person resolutely pulling out an obstinate and inexplicable drawer from somewhere about his knees, ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... have known him to sit through a long and heavy organ recital, not in a resigned manner but actively attentive, clearly determined that if the minutest portion of his soul was sensitive to the fugues of J. S. Bach he would allow that portion to bask in the sunshine of an unwonted experience. So that from one point of view he was the incarnation of tolerance as he certainly was the incarnation of good-humor and generosity. He envied no man his gifts from Nature or Fortune. He ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... nineteen miles north of Marburg, you may find marked clearly in the map No. 18 of Black's General Atlas, wherein the cluster of surrounding bewitched mountains, and the valley of Eder-stream otherwise (as the village higher up the dell still calls itself) "Engel-Bach," "Angel Brook," joining that of the Fulda, just above Cassel, are also delineated in a way intelligible to attentive mortal eyes. I should be plagued with the names in trying a woodcut; but a few careful pen-strokes, or wriggles, of your own off-hand touching, would give you ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... from Mozart, Beethoven, und Méhul Mit chorals of Sebastian Bach Soopline und peaudiful. Der Breitmann feel like holy saints, De tears roon down his fuss; Und he sopped out, "got verdammich ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... listen, and the song which you knew seems to sing itself, but enveloped with a richness and fulness of flowing accompaniment which is like the harping of aerial choirs. Then with others she plays the great music, concerted Bach or Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, or Wagner, Weber or Mendelssohn; now an old gavotte, now a quaint fantasia, and why not a toccata of Galuppi Baldassero? It is more than a hint or a reminiscence, although it is not an orchestra. But when those fingers kindred ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... take Beethoven; And, if the bargain does not suit, I'll throw him Weber in to boot! There's not the splitting of a splinter To chuse 'twixt him last named, and Winter. Of Doctor Pepusch old queen Dido Knew just as much, God knows, as I do. I would not go four miles to visit Sebastian Bach-or Batch-which is it? No more I would for Bononcini. As for Novello and Rossini, I shall not say a word about [to grieve] 'em, Because they're living. So ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... own study. We were all excessively provoked, for we were languishing, fretting, expiring to hear him talk.' Dr. Burney, taking up something that Mrs. Thrale had said, ventured to ask him about Bach's concert. 'The Doctor, comprehending his drift, good-naturedly put away his book, and see-sawing with a very humorous smile, drolly repeated, "Bach, Sir? Bach's concert? And pray, Sir, who is ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... been to take lessons of a real musician and be able to play the wonderful things that the old masters had composed. It is true that very few of these had come in her way. One somewhat mutilated copy of Handel's "Creation," a copy of Haydn's "Messiah," and a few fragments of an old book of Bach's Fugues and Preludes. Many of these she could not play at all, but others she had managed to pick out. A visit from a cousin who lived in Boston and told of the concerts given there by the Handel and Haydn Society had served to ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... was first played at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig the innovation caused a sensation, and there were loud cries of sacrilege and even proposals of police action. One indignant classicist, in token of his ire, hung a wreath of Knackwuerste around the neck of the bust of Johann Sebastian Bach in the Thomaskirche, and appended to it a card bearing the legend, Schweinehund! But the exquisite beauty of the effect soon won acceptance for the means employed to attain it, and the phonograph has so far made its way with German composers that Prof. Ludwig Grossetrommel, ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... such persevering labor and such unremitting zeal. Every man who has attained high preeminence in Science, Literature, or Art, would confess the same. At all events, the greatest musical composers—Bach, Handel, Haydn, Gluck—are proofs that no degree of genius and natural aptitude for their art is sufficient without long-continued effort and exhaustive study of the best models of composition. And this is the moral to be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... about the middle of June. Whatever may be thought of the relation of the apple to the fall of man, this creature certainly leads to the speedy fall of the apple. Who has not seen the ground covered with premature and decaying fruit in July, August, and September? Bach specimen will be found perforated by a worm-hole. The egg has been laid in the calyx of the young apple, where it soon hatches into a small white grub, which burrows into the core, throwing out behind it a brownish powder. After about three weeks of apple diet ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... modern as the masters just named. He was as boldly original as Schubert, and as great a magician in the art of arousing deep emotion by means of novel, unexpected modulations. As an originator of new harmonic progressions he has had only three equals,—Bach, Schubert, and Wagner. Harmonies as ultra-modern as those of Wagner's "Parsifal" may be found in some of the mazurkas of Chopin. He was, as Rubinstein called him, "the soul of the pianoforte." No one before or after him knew how to make that ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the organ, and descending to the art gallery, played Bach, Palestrina, and Stainer for an hour; then suddenly she started from the console, with a sharp, impatient ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... the resistance which it provoked, during the generation that passed away from the restoration to the fall of Metternich, and again under the reaction which commenced with Schwarzenberg and ended with the administrations of Bach and Manteuffel, proceeded from various combinations of the opposite forms of liberalism. In the successive phases of that struggle, the idea that national claims are above all other rights gradually rose to the supremacy which it now ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... lay a design, hardly veiled, not only against South America, but against ourselves. In a volume entitled With the Fathers, by John Bach McMaster, and also in the fifth volume of Mr. McMaster's history, chapter 41, you will find more amply what I abbreviate here. Canning understood the threat to us contained in the Holy Alliance. He made a suggestion to Richard Rush, our minister to England. The ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... principally instrumental. New compositions are seldom given; and, in fact, it was the practice of adhering so exclusively to the standard works of great composers which started the new Philharmonic Society, which has just come into existence. The elder body stick stanchly to the safe courses of Bach, Gluck, Beethoven, Mozart, and Mendelssohn. The newly-created association proclaim that their mission is to look after aspirants, as well as to honour the veterans of the art; and accordingly they ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... passionately devoted to music, which inspired some of her best poems; and during the last years of her life, in hours of intense physical suffering, she found relief and consolation in listening to the strains of Bach and Beethoven. When she went abroad, painting was revealed to her, and she threw herself with the same ardor and enthusiasm into the study of the great masters; her last work (left unfinished) was a critical analysis of the genius and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... certain test of greatness in art. The instantly popular tune is unendurable in six months, the instantly popular novel or poem is totally forgotten in a year or two. No one perceives the whole greatness of St. Paul's Cathedral, or Sansovino's Library at Venice, or the music of Bach, or the poetry of Milton, at the first sight or hearing. No competent eye, ear or mind fails to perceive more and more of it at each renewed experience. Whatever be the art, a picture, a piece of sculpture, a book, the test is the same: the cheap, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... nothing he had ever experienced served to quiet him so much as these end-of-the-week concerts. They were not too long, an hour and a half at the utmost; and, above all, except now and then, when the conductor would take a flight into the world of Bach, he found he followed him with at least a moderate degree of intelligence; certainly with personal ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... A Bach chaconne is on the orchestra programme this week. Some one remarked that he did not care for chaconnes, which moved us to quote what some one else (we think it was Herman Devries) ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... drinks and sandwiches, and Josephine was making tea, Robert played Bach on the piano—the pianola, rather. The chairs and lounge were in a half-circle round the fire. The party threw off their wraps and sank deep into this expensive comfort of modern bohemia. They needed the Bach to take away the bad taste that Aida ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... words is limited and his sentences are crude and halting, A grown man, having acquired the trick of language, may talk fluently and say nothing. In our endeavor to understand a work of art, a poem by Chaucer or by Tennyson, a picture by Greco or by Manet, a prelude by Bach or a symphony by Brahms, we may ask, Of that which the artist wanted to say, how much could he say with the means at his disposal? With a sense of the artist's larger motive, whether religious sentiment, or a love of sheer beauty ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... aspects of identical harmonic structure at every turn. This, however, is rendered possible and interesting by the fact that the passages in such counterpoint are separated by episodes and are free to appear in different keys. Many fugues of Bach are written throughout in multiple counterpoint; but the possibility of this, even to composers such as Bach and Mozart, to whom difficulties seem unknown, depends upon the freedom of the musical design which allows the composer to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... thrashing; but in the evening Gethin brought the boat back quite safely. He had been as far as Ynysoer, and he brought back a creel full of fish for Phil, to make up. Phil made a good penny by the fish, and forgave the boy bach; but his father was thorny to Gethin for a long time. Then at last he did something—I never knew what—that offended his father bitterly, and he was sent away, ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... rational evenings, where history is the lightest subject admitted, and geology and the sanitary condition of the metropolis form the general themes of conversation. Mrs. Brumby plays finely on the bassoon, and has evenings dedicated to Sebastian Bach, and enlivened with Handel. At Mrs. Maskleyn's they are ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that in the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous, alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy of ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons |
