Category: Art
«Music may be hard to understand, but musicians are men;» so remarked a friend of mine when I was first planning these essays. The sentence sums up very happily a truth I have constantly had in mind in writing them. As all music, no matter what its complexity on the technical...
When we turn from the brilliant Parisian we have been studying to that obscure and saintly man, César Franck, the only French contemporary of Saint-Saëns who is worthy to be ran...
10. Part 10A just conception of this broad scheme of Brahms's ideal and of his thoroughness in working it out is necessary, we must insist, not only to appreciation of the man himself, but...
8. Part 8Yet César Franck is inclined either to ignore these tendencies or to shift them into unexpected and circuitous channels. The dissonant chords, though they occur often in his wor...
1. Part 1«Music may be hard to understand, but musicians are men;» so remarked a friend of mine when I was first planning these essays. The sentence sums up very happily a truth I have c...
4. Part 4On the other hand, Grieg is never large or heroic; he never wears the buskin. He has neither the depth of passion nor the intellectual grasp needed to make music in the grand st...
2. Part 2Probably every one who has listened to the whistling of factories in a large city at noon has had the curious experience of suddenly hearing amid the meaningless din a pair of t...
9. Part 9He never, in fact, wholly outgrew certain peculiarities which are direct results of his emotional instability, his slavery to mood. His persistent use of minor keys, for example...
6. Part 6The surprising energy and versatility shown at the opening of Saint-Saëns's career have proved, in the course of time, to be the salient traits of his typically Gallic nature. H...
3. Part 3If expression depends thus in part upon the moral and temperamental qualities of the listener, form in equal measure depends upon his mental alertness. «Form,» says Dr. Santayan...
5. Part 5After his graduation from the Organ School in 1860 his situation, both practical and musical, slowly ameliorated. From Smetana, who gave him a position in the orchestra of the I...
11. Part 11Religion, then, man's final means of reading rationality in the countenance of an irrational world, is the culmination toward which the other three naturally tend. It is the nat...