Chopin and Other Musical Essays

Yet, after making due allowance for the fact that the word music was used in this comprehensive sense, enough remains to show that the power of music proper, the power of rhythm...

Every student of music should carefully heed Schumann's advice. "Exercise your imagination," he says, "so that you may acquire the power of remembering not only the melody of a...

My subject is by no means exhausted, but for fear of fatiguing the reader with an excess of details I will close with a few facts regarding Richard Wagner's method of composing....

Everybody has heard of the marvellous effect produced on Berlioz's ardent imagination by the _Juliet_ of Miss Smithson. He relates in his memoirs that an English critic said tha...

Some years ago I wrote in "The Nation" that if all pianoforte music in the world were to be destroyed, excepting one collection, my vote should be cast for Chopin's preludes. If...

The magnificent quintet in this act of "Die Meistersinger" also affords proof that if Wagner banished concerted music from his later works, it was not because he lacked inspirat...

It is this element of accident and uncertainty that lowers the value of many German singers. Herr Niemann, for instance, has moments--and, indeed, whole evenings--when his voice...

Again, if savages and emperors can be musical and cruel at the same time, this only proves, as I have just said, that music is not strong enough to overcome _all_ the vicious in...

Perhaps it is fortunate that Mr. Thomas's project was never realized. Had he succeeded, New York and several other cities would no doubt have enjoyed a series of interesting Wag...

One of the most interesting bits of information contained in this correspondence is that, when quite a young man, Schumann commenced a treatise on musical æsthetics. In view of...

One need only look at this, without understanding the language, to feel the rhythmic motion of the water, and imagine the song of the merry maidens. Again, in the famous love du...

The world suffered a great loss when a band of ignorant soldiers found the bundles of letters which Chopin had written from Paris to his parents, and used them to feed the fire...

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected | | in this text, whi...

As for the French critics they seem to have been as obtuse as their German colleagues. To give only one instance: M. Fétis, author of the well-known musical dictionary, states i...

In America, more than anywhere else, is music needed as a tonic, to cure the infectious and ridiculous business fever which is responsible for so many cases of premature collaps...

It is a curious thing, this scarcity of good singers. We read so much about all professions being over-crowded; and yet here is a profession in which success literally means mil...