United States or Greenland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then there is a "Toccata" for violin solo, by Paolo Quagliati, published in 1623, and a collection of violin pieces by Carlo Farina, published in 1627 at Dresden, in which the variety of bowing, double stopping, and chords shows a great advance in the demands upon the execution.
Open at random: here are two lines in 'A Toccata of Galuppi's, not deficient in melody by any means: "Dear dead women with such hair, too: what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old." This is not Villon's 'Ballad of Dead Ladies, nor even Tennyson's 'Dream of Fair Women'; but a master can still say a good deal in two lines.
The poem touches the borderland where art and religion meet. The Toccata of Galuppi left behind as its relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory existence. The extemporising of Abt Vogler fills the void which it has opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.
It is a genuine toccata, with moments of tender twilight, serving a distinct technical purpose the study of double notes and changing on one key and is as healthy as the toccata by Robert Schumann. Here is a brave, an undaunted Chopin, a gay cavalier, with the sunshine shimmering about him.
The Butterfly octaves, in another study, are made to hop nimbly along in the left hand, and the C major study, op. 10, No. 7, Chopin's Toccata, is arranged for the left hand, and seems very practical and valuable. Here the adapter has displayed great taste and skill, especially on the third page. The pretty musical idea is not destroyed, but viewed from other points of vantage.
We know the wonderful Bach Preludes, which grew out of a free improvisation to the collection of dance forms called a suite, and the preludes which precede his fugues. In the latter Bach sometimes exhibits all the objectivity of the study or toccata, and often wears his heart in full view. Chopin's Preludes the only preludes to be compared to Bach's are largely personal, subjective, and intimate.
And almost since the arrival of the Marshalls in La Chance and his unceremonious entrance into the house as, walking across the fields on a Sunday afternoon, he had heard Professor Marshall playing the Doric Toccata on the newly installed piano, he had spent his every Sunday evening in their big living-room.
In his Toccata of Galuppi he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. When in 1883 the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a poem to their Album he immediately complied with the request.
The poem of Italian music, A Toccata of Galuppi's, wholly subordinates the science to the sentiment of the piece. It is steeped in the melancholy of pleasure; Venice of the eighteenth century lives before us with its mundane joys, its transitory passions, its voluptuous hours; and in the midst of its warmth and colour a chill creeps upon our senses and we shiver.
"There's something in the comparison," Mr. Spatt admitted thoughtfully. "Why not like good Bach?" Musa asked, glaring in a very strange manner at Mr. Ziegler. "Bosh!" ejaculated Mr. Ziegler with a most notable imperturbability. "Only Bach himself could com-pose good Bach." Musa's breathing could be heard across the drawing-room. "Eh bien!" said Musa. "Now I will play for you Debussy's Toccata.
Word Of The Day