Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
The first work taken up in class was Brahms' Variations on a Handel theme. Von Bülow was in perfect sympathy with this noble work of Brahms and illumined many passages with clear explanations.
The final attempt to interest the public in his work, made during the succeeding season, brought but few people to repent of their former indifference. A revival of interest is scarcely to be expected. For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again. Indeed, it was a personality of just the sort that Brahms was not. The resemblance was of the most superficial.
Familiarity with the traditions of different schools of composition and performance is necessary also in order not to sing the songs of Bach and Handel like those of Schubert and Schumann, or Brahms like the modern French composers; in order not to interpret with like effects indiscriminately songs of the oratorio and opera, of Italian, German, French, English and modern Russian schools.
He attended the following Saturday evening concert; listened to a Brahms symphony that pleased him even more than had "The New World," and when, two weeks later, he heard the Tschaikowski "Pathetique" and later the "Unfinished" symphony, by Schubert, and a Beethoven symphony, attracted by each in turn, he realized that his prejudice against the whole question of symphonic music had been both wrongly conceived and baseless.
The "Chanson de Florian" might perhaps hold its own at a Vorspielen sung by Bertha Martin perhaps.... The remainder of her songs, excepting a little bound volume of Sterndale Bennett, she put away at the bottom of her Saratoga trunk. Meanwhile, there were songs being learned by Herr Bossenberger's pupils for which she listened hungrily; Schubert, Grieg, Brahms.
For, once his period of apprenticeship passed, and all desire to write symphonies and chamber-music in the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohn and Brahms, to construct operas after the pattern of "Tannhäuser" and "Parsifal" gone out of him, this slender, sleepy young Bavarian with the pale curly hair and mustaches had commenced to develop the expressive power of music amazingly, to make the orchestra speak wonderfully as it had never spoken before.
Little song written since Weber set his horns a-breathing, or Brahms transmuted the witchery of the German forest into tone, is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation of Heine: "Steiget auf, ihr alten Traüme! Oeffne dich, dur Herzenstor!"
Bachaus gave soon afterward with the New York Symphony, I was reminded of a memorable event which occurred during my student days in Berlin. It was a special concert, at which the honored guest and soloist was the great Brahms himself. Von Bülow conducted the orchestra, and Brahms played his second Concerto.
"This is the way she worked it. When the Martha was floated, we had to beach her right away at the head of the bay, and whilst repairs were going on, a new rudder being made, sails bent, gear recovered from the niggers, and so forth, Miss Lackland borrows Sparrowhawk to run the Flibberty along with Curtis, lends me Brahms to take Sparrowhawk's place, and starts both craft off recruiting.
For she was playing Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein, interpreting all those passionate voices of the subtlest moderns, through which the heart of our own day has expressed itself even more freely and exactly than through the voice of literature.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking