United States or Cabo Verde ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He visited all parts of Europe and met most of the celebrated musicians of the day. Spohr, Molique, Schumann, Paganini, Henselt, and Richard Wagner were among the celebrities whom he met, and in his tours he was associated with Servais, Thalberg, and other well-known artists. Not content with Europe as a field for conquest, he visited America in 1844, and again in 1857 and in 1870.
He never relaxes his theme, and its fluctuating surprises are many. The end is notable for the fact that scales appear. Chopin very seldom uses scale figures in his studies. From Hummel to Thalberg and Herz the keyboard had glittered with spangled scales. Chopin must have been sick of them, as sick of them as of the left-hand melody with arpeggiated accompaniment in the right, a la Thalberg.
To my great surprise, I found no less than six square piano-fortes belonging to different families in Reikjavik, and heard waltzes by our favourite composers, besides variations of Herz, and some pieces of Liszt, Wilmers, and Thalberg. But such playing! I do not think that these talented composers would have recognised their own works.
As for Clara, though already in her eighteenth year, she was one of the most famous pianists in the world, and favourably compared, in many respects, especially in point of poetical interpretation, with Liszt, Thalberg, Chopin, and Europe's brilliantest virtuosos.
Hardly any concert programme is considered complete without one or more numbers selected from his works; and though there are but few pianists, even in a day when Chopin as a stylist has been a study, who can do his subtile and wonderful fancies justice, there is no composer for the piano-forte who so fascinates the musical mind. Thalberg one of the Greatest of Executants.
Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semitones, touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance.
Thalberg, owing to his dignified repose, was caricatured as posing in a stiff, rigid manner before a box of keys. Rubinstein and Von Bülow offer two more contrasting personalities.
To Liszt and Thalberg, who had both shown me the greatest friendship, I dedicated the portion which contained the voyage up the Danube, because one was a Hungarian and the other an Austrian. With these indications, the reader will easily be able to trace out the thought which influenced me in the choice of each dedication.
These compositions are likely to be among the violin classics, though some of the violinists of the Spohr school have criticised them for want of depth. He produced seven concertos, eleven airs variés, several books of studies, four trios for piano, violin, and 'cello, and, together with Osborne, Thalberg, and other pianists, a number of brilliant duos for piano and violin.
What profanation! Hitherto the only chains that have surrounded that Temple have been chains of harmony, which one may wear and not be a slave! It has been a Temple of Concord; may we hope that it will be in truth a Temple of Justice! For virtuoso concerts, we shall have what the managers at New York send us. We shall of course have Vieuxtemps and Thalberg, if no more.
Word Of The Day