Chopin: The Man and His Music |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
accent admired arpeggio artistic Bach Ballade bass beautiful Beethoven Bülow cadenza called charming chords chromatic coda color composer composition concert dance dedicated double notes dramatic edition Ehlert étude F minor F sharp figure fingering flat major flat minor Fontana Frédéric Chopin friends G flat genius George Sand gives grace Gutmann harmonies Impromptu Karasowski Kleczynski Klindworth Kullak left hand Lenz Liszt Madame Majorca Mazurka melody metronome Mikuli minor Concerto minor Scherzo minor Sonata minor study mood morbid movement never Niecks nocturne Nohant octaves opus orchestral Paris passage passion pedal phrasing pianist piano piece Pleyel poet poetic Poland Polish Polonaise prelude published pupil rhythm rhythmical Riemann Robert Schumann rubato Rubinstein Scherzo Schumann sentiment sharp minor song soul Stanislaw Przybyszewski Stephen Heller style Tausig technical tempo theme Theodor Kullak third tion tone trio triplets Valse virtuoso Wagner Warsaw Willeby writes wrote
Popular passages
Page 118 - mid the tide of all emergency Now notes my separate wave, and to what sea Its difficult eddies labour in the ground ? Oh! what is this that knows the road I came, The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame, The lifted shifted steeps and all the way ? — That draws round me at last this wind-warm space, And in regenerate rapture turns my face Upon the devious coverts of dismay...
Page 135 - O strong-winged soul with prophetic Lips hot with the bloodbeats of song, With tremor of heartstrings magnetic, With thoughts as thunders in throng...
Page 94 - ... would be plenty of time to loaf in eternity. His pictures were everywhere, he became a kind of Flying Hungarian to the sentimental Sentas of those times. He told Judith Gautier that the women loved themselves in him. Modest man! What charm was in his playing an army of auditors have told us. Heine called Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a Sibyl and Doehler — a pianist.
Page 112 - Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole ; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.
Page 118 - In music the most indefinite and profound mysteries are revealed and placed outside us as a gracious, marvelous globe ; the very secret of the soul is brought forth and set in the audible world. That is why no other art smites us with so powerfully religious an appeal as music; no other art tells us such old forgotten secrets about ourselves. It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sexual traditions of the races before man was, that music is rooted. . . . The sexual instinct is more...
Page 188 - Chopin not only versifies an exercise in thirds; he transforms it into such a work of art that in studying it one could sooner fancy himself on Parnassus than at a lesson. He deprives every passage of all mechanical appearance by promoting it to become the embodiment of a beautiful thought, which in turn finds graceful expression in its motion.
Page 173 - Aeolian harp possessed all the musical scales, and that the hand of an artist were to cause them to intermingle in all sorts of fantastic embellishments, yet in such a way as to leave everywhere audible a deep fundamental tone and a soft, continuously singing upper voice, and you will get about the right idea.
Page 121 - Keats', and while he lingers by the river's edge to catch the song of the reeds, his gaze is oftener fixed on the quiring planets. He is nature's most exquisite sounding-board and vibrates to her with intensity, color and vivacity that have no parallel. Stained with melancholy, his joy is never that of the strong man rejoicing in his muscles. Yet his very tenderness is tonic and his cry is ever restrained by an Attic sense of proportion. Like Alfred De Vigny, he dwelt in a " tour d'ivoire
Page 276 - Ballade" belongs to him exclusively. Of these, he has also written four. Each one differs entirely from the 279 others, and they have but one thing in common — their romantic working-out, and the nobility of their motives. Chopin relates in them, not like one who communicates something really experienced; it is as though he told what never took place, but what has sprung up in his inmost soul, the anticipation of something longed-for.
Page 274 - In structure he is a child, playing with a few simple types, and almost helpless as soon as he advances beyond them; in phraseology he is a master whose felicitous perfection of style is one of the abiding treasures of the art.