United States or Saint Pierre and Miquelon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"The heart of Robert Schumann was a lyre so delicate, and with strings so sensitive, that the effect of his pains and his joys, both always in extremes, was as if you gave an Æolian harp to be swept now by a cold north-wind and now by a hot sirocco. His spirit wore on to the confines of his flesh, and was not warmly covered thereby, but only veiled.
"I'm delighted to hear it, sir," said the sergeant-major; "and, if you will excuse me, sir," he went on somewhat hesitatingly, "I'm glad, very glad, you've come back to the sixth, especially after you've fought for the Boers. I should like to go out there myself, you know, sir." "Oh, no, Schumann," said Reimers, "you must not think of that. I don't believe you would like it.
But that miserable article of Schumann deplorable gush that has been tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's the evil influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers, the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick, these things drove Brahms into the mistake never made by the really able men.
He played the piano with intelligence and feeling especially Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reached the "high jinks" of Wagner. To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six.
Chopin was too timid and gentle to be a bold aggressor, like Berlioz, Liszt, and Schumann, but his whole nature responded to the movement, and his charming and most original compositions, which glow with the fire of a genius perhaps narrow in its limits, have never been surpassed for their individuality and poetic beauty.
Jimmie made at Ischl, to her daughter-in-law, Baroness von Schumann, the baron being attached to an Austrian commission then in Italy; to several officers who were friends of our officers in Ischl, and, last but not least, to a little Hungarian, to whom I had a letter from America, who was so kind, so attentive, so fatherly to us, that he went by the name of "Little Papa" a soubriquet which seemed to give him no end of pleasure.
And to-day the sergeant-major didn't even seem to be thinking of a pause for luncheon. It therefore happened very opportunely when Captain von Wegstetten, having scarcely listened to the sergeant-major's report, "Nothing new in the battery," said: "Sergeant Schumann, I want to speak to you for a minute."
If he had pursued his musical studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. As it was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel, the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and London awakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure. There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too accomplished.
As Schumann declared, the dancers of these valses should be at least countesses. There is a high-bred reserve despite their intoxication, and never a hint of the brawling peasants of Beethoven, Grieg, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, and the rest. But little of Vienna is in Chopin.
While Schubert in his youth also came under the influence of his great contemporary, Beethoven, he soon emancipated himself completely from him, even in the symphony, in which, as Schumann pointed out, he opened up "an entirely new world" of melody, color, and emotion.
Word Of The Day