Mezzotints in modern music

The death of Johannes Brahms in 1897 removed from the sparsely settled land of music the last of the immortals; the one whom Bülow justly ranked with Bach and Beethoven; the one...

Regarding Brahms’ muddy orchestration, this is a question I leave to my betters. Scored in the high, violent purples and screaming scarlets of Richard Strauss, the grave, reflec...

In the tenth the bass is used in the upper part, and the subject derived from the diminishing to half or quarter notes of the beginning of the subject; the essential harmonies a...

But to op. 76, Clavierstücke von Johannes Brahms. This opus is divided into eight numbers, capriccios and intermezzi; for the composer disliked excessively giving his music set...

Brahms has the individual voice, and in his piano music his almost Spartan simplicity sometimes unmasks the illusory quality of the instrument. Yet, I protest if you tell me tha...

“Sadness came over me and a kind of indifferent dreariness. And I was not sad and dreary simply because it was Russia I was flying over. No; the earth itself; this flat surface...

Op. 45 is the Capriccio Italien, for orchestra, of which I once wrote: It is Russian icicles melted into fantastic shapes by Neapolitan fire and terpsichorean fury. The Russian...

Therefore the most tremendous surprise follows in the finale. Since the music of the march in the Eroica, since the mighty funeral music in Siegfried, there has been no such dea...

His melodies, it must be confessed, are not always remarkable or distinguished in quality, setting aside the question of ugliness altogether. But the melodic curve is big and pa...

We now trench upon a sacred and not often explored territory of the Chopin music. The scherzo in E flat minor is one of the most powerful of the six. To play it effectively one...

Beautiful as it is, Chopin’s polonaise-fantaisie opus 61, with its hectic flush--in its most musical, most melancholy cadences--gives us a premonition of death. Composed three y...

The something inexplicable to Western imaginations in Chopin’s playing and music, which Liszt so elaborately explains with his definition of Zãl, is nothing but the hopeless ant...

One penalty of genius is its pursuit by glossaries and gibes. Liszt was no exception. Like Maeterlinck and Ibsen, he has had many things read into his music; mysticism not being...

But what charming études are in op. 2 and op. 5! What a wealth of technical figures, what an imperative legato is demanded! and then, above all else, touch, euphony! To play Hen...

This clever Parisian has also written six new concert studies. The first is a double note arrangement of the D flat valse. Tausig, Rosenthal and Joseffy have done the same thing...

Beethoven, L. van, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 20, 21, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 64, 97, 102, 136, 144, 147, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 166, 171, 178, 218, 219, 221, 227, 229, 243, 247...