Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
Gottschalk fell far short of his possibilities, though he was the greatest piano executant ever produced by our own country. He might have dazzled the world even as he dazzled his own partial countrymen.
Indeed, the composer's demands on the technique of the executant were so novel at the time when the studies made their first public appearance that one does not wonder at poor blind Rellstab being staggered, and venting his feelings in the following uncouthly- jocular manner: "Those who have distorted fingers may put them right by practising these studies; but those who have not, should not play them, at least not without having a surgeon at hand."
He could not extemporise as Handel, and Bach in more restricted circles, had done, nor as Mozart and Beethoven were soon to do. Beethoven won social status for the musician tribe, but Beethoven, while as brilliant an executant as Handel, also had the advantage of reaching manhood just when the upset of the French Revolution was destroying all old-world notions.
This success wounded his feelings of artistic probity; he considered it unbecoming that people should be more taken up with the skill of the executant than with the beauties of the music, and the cadence was suppressed.
Invent a piano which will respond as delicately to the turning of a handle as our present ones do to the pressure of the fingers, and the acrobats will be driven back to their carpets and trapezes, because the sole faculty necessary to the executant musician will be the musical faculty, and no other will enable him to obtain a hearing."
If the man of science or the poet can at once enjoy and comprehend, bringing his intelligence to bear upon his enjoyment without loss of delight, he is conscious that the alphabet and phraseology of music are but cunning instruments for the composer, like the wood and copper wire under the hands of the executant.
She must woo, she saw; dare she trail this steel-armed lord of battles, this grim executant, this trumpet of God, as a led child by her girdle-ribbons? If hero he had proved in his own walk, to be sure he shambled pitifully on the edge of hers. Her superiority sparkled so hard and frosty-bright that she began to pity him; and so the maid was thawed to be the mother of her man.
It rests on a ball firmly placed on a massive pedestal, which is easily moved from one place to another by means of small wheels. The ball on which the harp rests revolves in a socket, so that the instrument can easily be placed in the position the performer desires, and then, by means of a bolt, fixed firmly in its place. No support from the executant is needed.
Alfred the Great becomes the Fairy Queen; Moses viewing the Promised Land, turns out to be Moses going to the Fair; Portrait of His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, is transformed, as if by irreverent enchantment of the dissenting interest, into A Favourite Terrier, or Cattle Grazing; and the most extraordinary work of art in the list described by the Bleater, is coolly sponged out altogether, and asserted never to have had existence at all, even in the most shadow thoughts of its executant!
However, not only as a creative artist, but also as an executant, Chopin was at the zenith of his power. His bodily frame had indeed suffered from disease, but as yet it was not seriously injured, at least, not so seriously as to disable him to discharge the functions of a musical interpreter.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking