United States or Albania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Olga had just opened her mouth, but shut it again. "No," she said. "Once more," and she whistled the motif. "Oh! it's so diffy!" said Lucia beginning again. "Georgie! Turn over!" Georgie turned over, and Lucia counting audibly to herself made an incomparable mess all over the piano. Olga turned to her accompanist. "Shall I try?" she said.
In each one of these letters to the churches there is repeated like a refrain, a sort of motif which announces the character of all, this final phrase: "He that overcometh." He is to receive the promise, he is to inherit these things, he is to be the stone in the temple of God.
As the Agha's daughter moved forward smiling her sad little smile, there came with her a waft of perfume like the fragrance of lilies; and the tinkling of bracelets on slender wrists, the clash of anklets on silk-clad ankles, was like a musical accompaniment, a faintly played leit motif. Perhaps Ourïeda had dressed herself in all she had that was most beautiful in honour of her guest.
Back to back, separated by little more than half the width of the gallery, Joan and Poluski worked steadily for twenty minutes. The Pole sang to himself incessantly, now bassooning between his thin lips the motif of some rhapsody of Lizst's, now murmuring the words of some catchy refrain from the latest review.
In point of time Theodore Parker comes first, and his discourses were keyed to a higher strain. Less theatrical than his gifted namesake, not so fluid nor so picturesque, his thought reduced to black and white reads better. What Theodore Parker said can be analyzed, parsed, taken apart. He always had a motif and his verb fetches up. He said things.
Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which the dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows. The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery and lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the serious and the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
There is not a more tranquil or a happier individual in his domestic life than this old troubadour retired from business, who sings from time to time his little song to the moon, without caring much whether he sings well or ill, provided he sings the motif that runs in his head, and who, the rest of the time, idles deliciously.... This pale character has the great pleasure of loving you with all his heart, and of not passing a day without thinking of the other old troubadour, confined in his solitude of a frenzied artist, disdainful of all the pleasures of the world."
"Who disturbs my sleep?" comes a hollow roar from the cave. The Fafner-motif is the old motif of the giants, slightly altered so that instead of the ponderous tread of the brothers it suggests the muffled ponderous beat of a gigantic sinister heart. Wotan and Alberich explain to the dragon his danger and indicate what may buy him safety.
Through memories of her father there many times sounded the notes of the bugle now this call, now that, piercing, compelling, sounding as motif of his life, thing before which all other things must fall away.
There can be no doubt of the need of vigilance if we are to catch the relevance of all the strains. To be sure, perhaps this perception is meant to be subconscious. In any case the consciousness would seem to ensure a full enjoyment. It is all based on the motif of the Wagner drama and of the Liszt symphonies, and it is carried to quite as fine a point.