Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
The satisfactory close of your stay in London has pleased me very much, and, as I know London, I think it would be well if you were to go there again next season. About this and some other business I shall tell you more when I see you. In the meantime I am delighted at your friendly relations with Berlioz.
Berlioz was utterly ruined, and he fled from France in the dead of winter as from a pestilence. The genius of this great man was recognized in Holland, Russia, Austria, and Germany, but among his own countrymen, for the most part, his name was a laughing-stock and a by-word.
Hector Berlioz, in his Voyage Musicale en Italie, has given as follows the curious effects that an Æolian harp produced upon his lively and impassioned imagination: "On one of those gloomy days that sadden the end of the year, listen, while reading Ossian, to the fantastic harmony of an Æolian harp swinging at the top of a tree deprived of verdure, and I defy you not to experience a profound feeling of sadness and of abandon, and a vague and infinite desire for another existence."
But the acute adventurer's mind returned to fix itself upon Ram Lal Singh, now blandly smiling in his jewel shop, where the morning gossips babbled over Johnstone Sahib's tragic death. "I must telegraph to Euphrosyne," thought the Major, "and to 9 Rue Berlioz, Paris, for my will-o-the-wisp employer. But, Mr. Ram Lal Singh, you shall pay me for what ruin Mirzah Shah's dagger has wrought!"
Perhaps he was ignorant of all this in his youth for Berlioz was a genius, not a scholar. The word genius tells the whole story. Berlioz wrote badly. He maltreated voices and sometimes permitted himself the strangest freaks. Nevertheless he is one of the commanding figures of musical art. His great works remind us of the Alps with their forests, glaciers, sunlight, waterfalls and chasms.
At the rehearsal, the looks of Berlioz followed Miss Smithson with such an intent stare, that she said to some one, "Who is that man whose eyes bode me no good?"
On a subsequent occasion these good people had to suffer for having interested themselves in me, as, in a report of my concerts by Herr Scudo, they were held up to ridicule as a family of strong democratic tendencies. I now looked up my friend Berlioz, whose acquaintance I had recently renewed in London, and on the whole I found him kindly disposed.
Mephistophetes summons will-o'-the-wisps to aid in the bewilderment of the troubled mind of Marguerite. Here realism sadly disturbs the scene as Berlioz asks that the fancy shall create it. The customary dancing lights of the stage are supplemented with electrical effects which are beautiful, if not new. They do not mar if they do not help the grotesque minuet.
It managed only to express itself partially, fragmentarily, in various transformations, till, by change, it found in the idea of the Mass for the Dead its fitting opportunity. Still, it was never entirely absent from the art of Berlioz, and in the great clear sense of it gained in the "Requiem" we can perceive its various and ever-present substantiations, from the very beginning of his career.
War was declared upon Chopin by a part of the musical world. The criticism was compounded of pure malice and stupidity. Chopin was angered but little for he was too sick to care now. He went to an evening party but missed the Macready dinner where he was to have met Thackeray, Berlioz, Mrs. Procter and Sir Julius Benedict. With Benedict he played a Mozart duet at the Duchess of Sutherland's.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking