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Updated: June 4, 2025
Beale called it, a "Moonlight Berceuse" sent her through the post by Sir Claude, who considered that her musical education had been deplorably neglected and who, the last months at her mother's, had been on the point of making arrangements for regular lessons.
When Diaz returned and seated himself to play the Berceuse, I saw that he could look at me without turning his head. And now, instead of flushing, I went cold. My spine gave way suddenly. I began to be afraid; but of what I was afraid I had not the least idea. I fixed my eyes on my programme as he launched into the Berceuse.
His choice was three manuscripts of Chopin's, one of them being this nocturne. A letter from Mr. Polinski on the subject of this nocturne is in the possession of Miss Janotha. Is this the nocturne of which Tausig spoke to his pupil Joseffy as belonging to the Master's "best period," or did he refer to the one in E minor? The Berceuse, op. 57, published June, 1845, and dedicated to Mlle.
"If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now." Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. He wheeled round and beheld her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward, on the keys. She was facing him. Her tall form was robed now in some shapeless, clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft, like the curtains.
There is no spiritual kinship whatever between him and Millet. Dalou models the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé with as much zest as he does his "Boulonnaise allaitant son enfant;" his touch is as sympathetic in his Rubens-like "Silenus" as in his naturalistic "Berceuse." Furthermore, there is absolutely no note of melancholy in his realism which, at the present time, is a point well worth noting.
It is a miracle; and after the drawn-out chord of the dominant seventh and the rain of silvery fire ceases one realizes that the whole piece is a delicious illusion, but an ululation in the key of D flat, the apotheosis of pyrotechnical colorature. Niecks quotes Alexandre Dumas fils, who calls the Berceuse "muted music," but introduces a Turkish bath comparison, which crushes the sentiment.
Once more Aaron Shellak was entertaining the cutting-room staff with a pianissimo rendition of Godard's Berceuse; but even as Abe tiptoed across the showroom to crush the performance with an explosive "Koosh!" the melody ceased. "That's a genu-ine Amati," Aaron said, "and you could see for yourself inside here is the label." Abe stopped short.
This subsides in ravishingly liquid arpeggios, "melodious tears"? which obtain the kindred effect of Chopin's tinkling "Berceuse" in a slightly different way. This notable work is marred by an interlude in which the left hand mumbles harshness in the bass, while the right hand is busy with airy fioriture. It is too close a copy of the finish of the first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata.
His polonaises and nocturnes are vastly superior to those of Weber and Field; and his poetic preludes, his romantic ballads, his lovely berçeuse, his amorous mazurkas, are new types in art which have often been imitated but never equalled. Only in one field did Chopin have a dangerous rival among his predecessors, namely, in the Waltz.
When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle. Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul, but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he finds a kind of humour.
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