Modern music and musicians : [Encyclopedic] . The lastmovement—a wild, fantastic tarantella, with only a few snatches of mel-ody—finishes in exhaustion and death. The whole sonata, says Bene-dict, is intended to depict the struggle of the reason against the demonof insanity. A cursory examination of the work shows that it is freefrom those defects of structure which are evident here and there in theother sonatas. The first movement, for example, hangs together per-fectly. There is none of the customary awkwardness in moving from onesubject to another, because the composers mind has a solid dra
Modern music and musicians : [Encyclopedic] . The lastmovement—a wild, fantastic tarantella, with only a few snatches of mel-ody—finishes in exhaustion and death. The whole sonata, says Bene-dict, is intended to depict the struggle of the reason against the demonof insanity. A cursory examination of the work shows that it is freefrom those defects of structure which are evident here and there in theother sonatas. The first movement, for example, hangs together per-fectly. There is none of the customary awkwardness in moving from onesubject to another, because the composers mind has a solid dramaticscheme to guide and support it. We are not perplexed, as in some of theother sonatas, by the frequent intrusion of passages that seem to havebeen taken bodily from an opera and grafted upon the milder substanceof abstract music. Spitta has remarked that his pianoforte style shows,within reasonable limit, a leaning to the orchestral. For instance, in thefinale of the Sonata in D minor he must certainly have had the cello and °c^-§. A MANUSCRIPT OF VON WEBERS. From the Royal Library, Berlin. clarinet in mind when he wrote the cantabile and the still more beautifulcounter-subject. Again, in the first movement of the Sonata in C, hismental ear has evidently been filled with the sound of the orchestra frombar 4. In numerous other passages we feel not only that the themeshave been conceived orchestrally, but that they are phrased—it may beunconsciously—to words. We feel that the passage marked con dolore,in the second sonata, has not only been associated, in Webers mind, withthe oboe color, but that the human voice and human speech have hadsomething to do with the conception of this essentially vocal phrase. Themarks of the drama and the orchestra are evident also in the con duolopassage that precedes the reentry of the first subject. Time after time,in the piano works, we have the impression that the proper setting forthis or that theme is the theater. We arrive • a
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookidmode, booksubjectmusicians
