"Sonata" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... afternoon he had been practising with fury; first scales, then exercises. Then a pause; and now, his fingers slipped into the first movement of the Waldstein Sonata. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... another hurrying past, and upstairs they went and down they went, until a sort of fulness settled on the court, the hive full of bees, the bees home thick with gold, drowsy, humming, suddenly vocal; the Moonlight Sonata answered ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... often talks of you; in various keys, tunes, and expressions, I allow—but be it Lesson or Country Dance, Sonata or Waltz, you are really its constant theme. I wish you could come and see us, as easily as ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... toil. So far as they go, the enjoyments of the healthy body are as innocent and as ardent as those of the soul. As there is no ground of comparison, so there is no ground of antagonism. How compare a sonata and a sea-bath or measure the Sistine Madonna against a gallop across country? The best thanksgiving for each is to enjoy the other also, and educate the mind to ampler nobleness. After all, the best verdict on athletic exercises was that of the great Sully, when he said, "I was always of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... quality was made to me in a manner which showed his modesty. One evening during our student days at Berlin, at a reception given by the American minister of that period,—Governor Vroom of New Jersey,—I heard the sound of music coming from one of the more distant apartments. It was a sonata of Beethoven, wonderfully interpreted, showing not only skill but deep feeling. On my asking my neighbors who the performer might be, no one seemed to know, until, at last, some one suggested that ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... lesson, Christopher Fedoritch," he said. "Lisa Mihalovna and I are going to play a duet of Beethoven's sonata." ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... of the last harpsichords made. The date upon the case was 1802. Beethoven's famous "Moonlight Sonata" was written for either harpsichord or piano. It was published in 1802. Hummel played on the harpsichord as late as 1805, but it had to give way, though most reluctantly, to the new invention called the ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... envied the dwarf ten times more than she did now, had she but known how they stood compared with each other. For the being of Helen to that of Rachel was as a single, untwined primary cell to a finished brain; as the peeping of a chicken to the song of a lark—I had almost said, to a sonata of Beethoven. ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... wondering herself that she never did. They are not satisfied with hearing her once. They ask for more, and they get it. The other evening I had to keep quiet on my chair while she thumped through four pieces one after the other, including the Beethoven Sonata. We knew it was the Beethoven Sonata. She told us before she started it was going to be the Beethoven Sonata, otherwise, for all any of us could have guessed, it might have been the 'Battle of Prague.' We all sat round with wooden faces, staring at our boots. ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... sonatas, 32 piano sonatas, numerous string quartets and dozens of other key works. Many of his works are ingeniously imaginative and innovative, such as his 3rd symphony (the "Eroica"), his 9th Violin Sonata (the "Kreutzer"), his "Waldstein" piano sonata, his 4th and 5th piano concertos, or his "Grosse Fugue" for string quartet. (Of course, each of Beethoven's works adds its own unique detail to Beethoven's grand ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... viols and a harpsichord, composed by Ferrabosco, son of the Italian musician who had settled in Greenwich at the end of the sixteenth century. Sir Owen was extraordinarily pleased and interested, and declared the pavane to be as complete as a sonata by Bach or Beethoven; but his appreciation was suddenly interrupted by someone looking ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... in Rome, not unduly tired, and with all the dear instruments intact, unharmed by rough hands of porters and Custom House officers, that, one of these days, in three or four months, when I am well, I look forward to contributing the viola da gamba part of a sonata to the concert of the old instrumental music which he will give when he has put his choir in order: you know I used to play that instrument in my young days. A more innocent wish never entered into the heart of a human ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... had passed and Sir Victor did not return. Edith still remained at the piano, the gleam of the candles falling upon her thoughtful face, playing the weird "Moonlight Sonata." She played so softly that the shrill whistling of the wind around the gables, the heavy soughing of the trees, was plainly audible above it. Ten minutes more, and her lover did not return. Wondering a little what the telegram ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... and general observation had taught him that men are sensual beings, and that sensualism must die for want of food if it were not for sex instincts, if it were not for Art, and especially for Music. This view of life he forcibly expressed in the "Kreutzer Sonata," in which Woman and Music, the two magnets of his youth, were impeached as powers of evil. Already, in "War and Peace" and in "Anna Karenina," his descriptions of female charms resembled catalogues of weapons ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... a third peculiarity of Chopin's style which may be included under the name of rubato, namely, his habit of "robbing" the note, not of its duration, but its accent. Every student of music knows that the symphony and sonata are called "idealized dance forms," because they are direct outgrowths of the dances that were cultivated originally in Italy, France, and Germany. Now, one peculiarity of these dances is the fact that the accent always falls on the first beat of each bar. This is ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... one tell me what it means? I want to find the old unhappy far off things which Wordsworth imagined in the Gaelic song of the 'Highland Lass.' I feel out of it, uneasy, thinking all the time what a poor creature I must be. I remember the mother of the sonata players approaching me with beaming countenance on the occasion of one of these performances, expecting the compliment which I faltered forth, doing my best not to look insincere. 'And I have this every evening of my life,' cried the triumphant mother. 'Good ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Honesty and which was Rockit, and the difference had been pointed out to him many times. He liked Larkspur and Canterbury bells, or was it their names that he loved them for? He sometimes mistook one for the other just as Ellen mistook one sonata for another, but she ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... said often," he replied, and he crashed into the master's B minor Sonata, "The Invitation to Hissing and Stamping," as Gumprecht ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... The latest and most atrocious outrage on good taste in this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as "the Hammerklavier." All musicians of finer feeling should unite to kill ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... same subject with a passage taken from a piano and violin sonata of Beethoven. The non-legato passages here are not to be played on the violin in a way approaching the staccato, although they are written as detached notes; and the piano part follows the rendering ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... the letter. His head was in a whirl. He only half heard the notes of the tutor's sonata as they rose and fell on his ear. Presently, with beating ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... pupil should be able to determine the general structure of a piece he is undertaking and should be so familiar with the structure that it becomes a form of second nature to him. If the piece is a sonata he should be able to identify the main theme and the secondary theme whenever they appear or whenever any part of them appears. Inability to do this indicates the most superficial kind ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Petrarch and Alamanni. The music of the birds kept time to the sound of the postilions' whips—the streams sung a fairy legend, and the merry woods, touched with the brilliant glow of an Italian sun, breathed into the air a delicious sonata. Such a morning as this was formed for something memorable! The Grand Diavolo and his bravest ruffians ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... a strange and inexplicable charm, but it had not changed the simplicity of her home life. This beautiful girl, in her quaint Norwegian costume, was able to give tranquilly her opinion on the deepest scientific subjects, or seat herself at the piano, and play with consummate skill a sonata of Beethoven. But her greatest charm was the absence of all pretension, and her perfectly natural manners. She no more thought of being vain of her talents, or of making any display of them, than she did of blushing on account of her rural costume. She bloomed like some ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... aspirations lie in those grey eyes, mysteriously still, and mysteriously revealed. These a young man longs to know of, they are his life. He imagines himself sitting by her, when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name; sometimes she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata. Letting her hands droop upon the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of life, of its disenchantments. He knows well what she means, he has suffered as she has; but could he tell her, could she understand, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... you play a Mozart sonata yet, Isabel? The more need to practice. All one's life is a music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time. But ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... kindled at the sight, for the thousandth time he experienced the artistic satisfaction of the connoisseur in collegiate architecture, and mentally limned the remainder of the plan. His sensations were like those of a skilled musician who has heard the first movement of a masterly sonata and is left to imagine the perfect whole. The sun, now mounting toward the zenith, was shortening the shadows of the tower on the slate roof that shone in the bright atmosphere like dull silver. Not a student ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... In Hamburg that is one of the things people don't do. In Mainz and in many other German towns there are certain streets where one side, for reasons no one can explain, is taboo at certain hours of the day; not of the night, but of the day. You may go to a music shop at midday to buy a sonata, and find, if you are a girl, that you have committed a crime. The intercourse between young people outside their homes is hedged round with convention. German titles of address are so absurdly formal that Germans laugh at them themselves. ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... of the utmost intimacy with the works of all the great composers. Bill Opus and Jeremiah Fugue have no secrets from him—none whatever—and in conversation he creates the impression that old Issy Sonata was his first cousin. He can tell you offhand which one of the Shuberts—Lee or Jake—wrote that Serenade. He speaks of Mozart and Beethoven in such a way a stranger would probably get the idea that Mote and Bate used to work for his folks. He can ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... she chose a piece of pure organ music—the exquisitely simple Largo of the Second Sonata. From that she passed on to the Pastoral itself, opening it, as of custom, with the fine Andante movement—the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... looked like nobody else's coat—and, thin and black and idle, she sat in a low chair by the fire, and put out her hand for her cup. 'I've been to a musical,' she said. And she told them how she had been wedged into a corner for an interminable sonata and hadn't been able to get away. 'I tried to, once, but my hostess saw me and made a most ominous hiss at me; every one's eye was turned on me, and I sank back again, covered with ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... that it might have been; she might not have won the Gold Medal of our white-shirted academies, but she had enough temperament to make half a dozen Steinway Hall virtuosi. From valse to nocturne, from sonata to prelude, her fancy ran. With crashing chords she dropped from "L'Automne Bacchanale" to the Nocturne in E flat; scarcely murmured of that, then tripped elvishly into Moszkowsky's Waltz, and from that she dropped to a song of Tchaikowsky, almost heartbreaking ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... originality, due to their being closely allied to the dramatic meaning, of all the themes should be noted: only one, the second part of the love-theme (a), suggests any other music. It is reminiscent of the introduction of Beethoven's Sonata "Pathetique," and, after all, the phrase was not ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... grand Sonata" for the piano-forte, composed by J. B. Cramer, fame speaks largely. An eminent connoisseur and reviewer speaks of it in these words: "We here recognise the genuine style of J. B. Cramer—this is really a grand sonata. It consists of three different movements, each so excellent in its kind, that it is difficult ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... of the most extraordinary instances of inspiration in dreams is told of Tartini, the Italian musician, whose "Devil's Sonata" is well known to musicians. He dreamed that the father of evil played this piece to him, and upon waking he put it on paper. It is a strange wild performance, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... more especially belong to you. Usually a woman gives up her own name and takes her husband's—" An idea forced itself upon her and made her blush. She took Roger's hand and led him to the open piano.—"Listen," said she, "I can play my sonata now like an angel!" and her fingers were already running over the ivory keys, when she felt herself seized ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... religious tracts belong to literature by the beauty and simple directness of their style. Two short stories and one long novel, all written with a didactic purpose, are of this period, and added to their author's reputation: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreuzer Sonata," and "Resurrection." ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... object as the only thing to be feared. In such case they have two enemies to combat; their love and their lover. But when the lover departs, love remains; and although the progress it makes in solitude is not so rapid, it is no less dangerous. It is then that the execution of a sonata, the sketching of a flower, the reading of a good book, will distract the attention from a too seductive remembrance, and fix the mind on something useful. All occupations which employ the mind are so many thefts ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... entitled "The Pianoforte Sonata: its Origin and Development." Some of the early sonatas mentioned in it were, however, written for instruments of the jack or tangent kind. Even Beethoven's sonatas up to Op. 27, inclusive, were published ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... breadth and symmetry and that sort of thing! Now do you think we might vary that noble masterpiece with a waltz?" Can we blame the poor fellow? Wagner represents a noise to him, and the awful scorn and despair of the first movement in the "Moonlight Sonata" only lead him to say, "Heavy play with that left hand. Can't he go faster over the treble, or whatever they call it?" He wants intelligible musical ideas, and we have no right to begin "level-raising" with the unhappy and remonstrant man. The music halls in London are ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... life were so clouded by his deafness and by the distressing vagaries of his nephew that he was often on the verge of suicide. In December, 1826, he caught a violent cold, which brought on his ultimate death from pneumonia and dropsy. Beethoven, though he adhered to the sonata form of the classic school, introduced into his compositions such daringly original methods that he must be regarded as the first of the great romantic composers. Some of his latest compositions notably, were so very unconventional that they found no appreciation, even among ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... is charming. The negroes here get so tired of salt fish and occra broth, that they eat dirt by way of a relish. Mr O'Brien, how remarkably well you played that sonata of Pleydel's ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... poor peasant parvenu when he heard his charming Cesarine play a sonata by Steibelt or sing a ballad; when he saw her writing French correctly, or making sepia drawings of landscapes, or listened while she read aloud from the Racines, father and son, and explained the beauties of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... I stand at E's, and I therefore proceed with a sonata in F, composed, not by Beethoven, but by a horse-breaker, with certain amplifications of my own: "The young horse was in famous fettle, and framed splendidly over the flakes; but he seemed all of a flabber-gaster when he caught ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Variations on the theme of Der Schweizerbub, which Chopin composed between his twelfth and seventeenth years at the house of General Sowinski's wife in the course of "a few quarter-hours." The Variations sur un air national allemand were published after the composer's death along with his Sonata, Op. 4, by Haslinger, of Vienna, in 1851. They are, no doubt, the identical composition of which Chopin in a letter from Vienna (December 1, 1830) writes: "Haslinger received me very kindly, but nevertheless would publish neither the Sonata nor the Second Variations." ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... took the 'cello, and after a few moments spent in carefully tuning up, began with Handel's immortal Largo, then he wandered into the Adagio Movement in Haydn's third Sonata, from thence to Schubert's Impromptu in C Minor, after which he began the Serenade, when he was ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... earnestness or gravity in a world where Geraldine represented womanhood wooed and about to be wedded? There was but one way of stopping the gabble which was driving her frantic; she threw open the piano and began to play, to play the first music that came into her mind. It was a passage from the Moonlight Sonata. A few moments, and the ghosts were laid. The girls still whispered together, but above their voices the pure stream of music flowed with gracious oblivion. When Emily ceased, it was with an inward fervour of gratitude ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... absorbing, while whole Joachim quartets flowed and rippled all round, but never into, us; and then, some other time, our soul seems to have drunk up (every fibre blissfully steeping) a few bars of a sonata (it was Beethoven's 10th violin, and they were stumbling through it for the first time) heard accidentally while walking up and down under ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... tunes, gone accurately through the whole of Beethoven's Sonata in B, to let him know that I was within hearing, but he ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... a majority of the seventy different breeds of bipedal brutes who acknowledge the rule of the Romanoffs. A Russian peasant smells like the Chicago river on a summer's day, or Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata." He's more disagreeable to the olfactories than old John Jacob Astor's hide house, from whose effluvia sprung the master spirits of Gotham's Four Hundred. He will eat what would send a coyote howling out of the country. To him a jug of train-oil were as angel-food, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata, called Appassionata. There is one here who plays that, and because it tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... was a literal world—a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the usual way. When the dictation finished early, there would be music—the music that he loved most—Beethoven's symphonies, or the Schubert impromptu, or the sonata by Chopin.—[Schubert, Op. 142, No. 2; Chopin, Op. 37, No. 2.]—It is easy to understand that this carried one a remove farther from the customary things of life. It was a setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation. In my ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine |
