United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Ivan halted, quickly lifting his head, as an animal who scents something: "You think so? An entire tone-poem?" The tone was alive with attentiveness. "Why not?" "Ah a little too fragile too wanting in discord." A moment's pause. Then he broke out in another voice: "But you, Balakirev, it is your idea: your theme. You felt it, therefore it belongs to you.
The draperies were now slightly parted and into the room filtered the grave, languorous accents of the new tone-poem. Her eyes were fixed by Rentgen's. His expression changed; with nostrils dilated like a hunter scenting prey, his rather inert, cold features became transfigured; he was the man who listened, the cruel judge who sentenced.
The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it.
The orchestra played their tone-poem faultlessly as to notes. Like so many machines, the instruments performed each its allotted part. But, oh, Heavens! the effect! Expression: fire, poetry, understanding piano, fortissimo, crescendo, rubato there was absolutely none. Never had thing so dead, so stiff, so hideous, so discordant, been heard in that opera-house.
It was the 2d of February before the Ophelia tone-poem lay before him finished, polished to the last point of perfection. Another week and "Isabella" Kashkine's translation, his own score would receive its last stroke of the pen.
A major ending would have crushed this extraordinary tone-poem, written, Chopin admits, under the direct inspiration of Adam Mickiewicz's "Le Lac de Willis." Willeby accepts Schumann's dictum of the inferiority of this Ballade to its predecessor. Niecks does not. Niecks is quite justified in asking how "two such wholly dissimilar things can be compared and weighed in this fashion."
And there are phrases in his tone-poem that commence with all his proper rhythmic ardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are moments when his harmonic sense, generally keen and true, abandons him completely.
For many weeks, indeed, he confined himself to but two things: the overture, as a conscientious necessity; and a tone-poem, in which, as an unconventional form, he might embody the best of his vagrant fancies, and the rich, unlawful harmonizations wherein already, fresh though he was from classical remonstrance, he delighted.
Some staves were drawn on the back of a bill-of-fare, and here, amid all the confusion and riot, the divine melody of the "Serenade" was born, a tone-poem which embodies the most delicate dream of passion and tenderness that the heart of man ever conceived.
Indeed both felt, in their secret souls, that no tone-poem ever written could be worth the price paid for this unhappy work: which had, nevertheless, through Anton's very jealousy given Ivan the knowledge that he stood already more than one round above his fellows on the great ladder of attainment.
Word Of The Day