Word: liszt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Liszt was the first. He dropped by to say hello one day in the 1930s when Rosemary Brown was only seven. "He had long white hair and wore a black gown," she recalls, "and he told me that when I grew up, he would give me music." Sure enough, one day in 1964, when Rosemary was playing the piano in her home in Laitwood Road, Balham, one of London's poorer suburbs, she suddenly lost control of her hands. She looked up and there was Liszt, hawk nose, white hair, black gown and all, guiding her fingers over...
...Liszt soon rounded up a staggering assortment of creative but deathless friends, among them Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and J.S. Bach. They all seemed to have learned English and appeared eager to use Mrs. Brown to make up for lost composition time. Rosemary laid in a supply of music paper and set to work copying down the carefully considered musical thoughts of history's greatest composers. "Liszt controls my hands for a few bars at a time, and then I write the music down," explains Mrs. Brown. "Chopin tells me the notes at the piano and pushes my hands onto...
...late at night, eat crackers and cheese, drink beer and watch on TV those old movies about composers! Cornel Wilde as Chopin murmuring sweet note-things to Merle Oberon as George Sand in A Song to Remember. How (munch) romantic! Dirk Bogarde as Liszt tirelessly flailing away at the old 88 in Song Without End. Good (crunch) show...
Anton Bruckner's Overture in G minor proved to be a beautiful small piece. Bruckner belongs to that unhappy group of composers including Liszt. Schmidt, Reger, Vaughan Williams, and even Schoenberg, whose music is fashionably vilified without benefit of humane audition. The tedious and lamentable caricature of Bruckner most often encountered is of an amateurish, even childishly naive, rural organist who afflicted the world with eleven appallingly identical symphonies which are massive, repetitious, incoherent and only convulsively appealing. If he is given any credit at all, which rarely happens since people prefer summary condemnation to critical acceptance of monumental genius...
...merely the craft of symphonic composition. Others consider him, like all other "late-romantic" (i.e., decadent) composer, as imperishable for is aspirations but cruelly betrayed by the fragility of is introspective poeitc angelus. These views are of course critical abnegations; as Tovey said of the still-fashionable distaste for Liszt, belief in devils is so easy...