Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 17, 2025
Spontini, one of the most successful composers of the time, held him in affectionate admiration, and always bade him be of good cheer. Paganini, the greatest of violinists, had hailed him as equal to Beethoven.
Spontini professed an adoration for Mozart which bordered upon idolatry, but his music shows rather the influence of Gluck. He is the last of what may be called the classical school of operatic composers, and he shows little trace of the romanticism which was beginning to lay its hand upon music.
And then it was natural, since I love you. And you know it." She knew very well that all she could say would only irritate him. He asked her whether that was the way she spoke in the Rue Spontini. She looked at him with sadness. "Jacques, you have often told me that there were hatred and anger in your heart against me. You like to make me suffer. I can see it."
Spontini embodied the same influences and characteristics in still larger degree, for his musical genius was organized on a more massive plan. Deficient in pure graceful melody alike with Méhul, he delighted in great masses of tone and vivid orchestral coloring.
Wagner himself even says, in his "Tendencies and Theories," speaking of Cherubini and his great co-laborers Méhul and Spontini: "It would be difficult to answer them, if they now perchance came among us and asked in what respect we had improved on their mode of musical procedure."
There was no Italian suppleness and grace in Wagner's nature: when he was in deadly earnest, and striving to express himself without thinking of models, he wrote gorgeous stuff; when the inspiration waned, or when he deluded himself with the belief that what he supposed to be Bellini-like tunes really expressed the feeling of the moment, then he gave us pages as dry and dreary as Spontini and Marschner at their worst.
Jenny Lind has always regarded the character of Agatha as the keystone of her fame. From the night of this performance she was the declared favorite of the Swedish public, and continued for a year and a half the star of the opera of Stockholm, performing in "Euryanthe," "Robert le Diable," "La Vestale," of Spontini, and other operas.
Obviously I had only seen the caricature of the man, although the tendency towards such plainly overweening self-confidence may, at all events, have manifested itself earlier in life. At the same time, one could trace in all this the influence of the decay of the musical and dramatic life of the period, which Spontini, situated as he was in Berlin, was well able to witness.
In 1809 Spontini married the niece of Erard, the great pianoforte-maker, and was called to the direction of the Italian opera; but he retained this position only two years, from the disagreeable conditions he had to contend with, and the cabals that were formed against him.
As to the latter his hopes were realized, but he did not meet many musicians, and could only gaze at them from a distance. It may have been a certain shyness and reticence that stood in the way, for he wrote home about a concert in the Singakademie: "Spontini, Zelter and Felix Mendelssohn were all there, but I spoke to none of these gentlemen, as I did not think it becoming to introduce myself."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking