Musical Memories

Piano Tuning

Chapters of Opera

Songs from Books

The Alchemist

The Sot-Weed Factor

Chopin and Other Musical Essays

Life of Chopin

It is fair to characterise the three suites of original water-colour drawings, as executed by our artist, as unique examples of the great George Cruikshank's special individual proficiency as an exponent of this branch of technical dexterity. More-over, it may be regarded as a fortunate circumstance that the three works, here reproduced with amazing fidelity in facsimile, represent happily the very chefs d'oeuvre of his wonderful productions; in their respective categories, preserving the best examples of his remarkable genius as an imaginative creator of vivid pictures, alike stirring and animated, and representing at one glance his vast dramatic powers, his mastery of the humorous side of life, and the intensity he was consistently able to infuse into terrible and tragic scenes. It is noteworthy that the inimitable artist George Cruikshank but rarely pro-duced finished water-colour drawings; the bulk of his prolific and familiarly rec-ognised designs for book illustrations were mostly dainty pencil sketches, occa-sionally finished in pen and ink. It is a problem difficult to solve satisfactorily whether, beyond the three memorable instances of the works here reproduced in facsimile, there are in existence any other complete suites of original illustrations by George Cruikshank—that is to say, fully executed by his master hand as finished water-colour drawings. Tinted sketches may be found in the prized possessions of Cruikshank collectors, and spirited studies for many of his favourite and most successful subjects have been cleverly touched in with watercolours; for instance, such as certain of his original drawings as designed for the illustrations of Harri-son Ainsworth's Tower of London, and the clever historical and picturesque series of Windsor Castle designs; these are, however, to be regarded as exceptional cases, for the bulk of these most successful and popular designs were carefully executed in pencil, or occasionally outlined with the pen, and highly finished with washes of warm sepia. It is worthy of recollection that Cruikshank was a most dexterous artist in this monochrome branch, his earlier artistic experiences having been al-most exclusively in the walk of aqua-tinted etchings; all his early book illustrations, his caricatures, and satirical plates—social or political—were uniformly etched by his hand in the most spirited fashion, after his ready sketches and rough studies, and when the outline etching was bitten in, Cruikshank elaborately worked out his colour suggestions, for light and shade, with a brush over the first-etched outline, in tones of sepia or Indian ink, for the guidance of the professional 'aquatinters'—the school of artists to whose trained skill was entrusted the task of completing these plates to produce the effect of highly finished washed drawings in mono-chrome. By this, his youthful practice, George Cruikshank had acquired remarka-ble dexterity, his original pen-and-ink designs, and the outline etchings, after his earlier book illustrations, being worked up in monochrome to the dainty finish of delicate miniatures, in which art both his father Isaac and his brother Isaac Robert were first-class proficients, as he himself has recorded with pride in describing the special gifts and qualifications which distinguished the Cruikshank family. ? ABOUT THE AUTHOR; George Cruikshank (1792 – 1878) was a British caricaturist and book illustrator, praised as the "modern Hogarth" during his life. His book illustrations for his friend Charles Dickens, and many other authors, reached an international audience. Cruikshank was born in London. His father, Isaac Cruikshank, was one of the leading caricaturists of the late 1790s and Cruikshank started his career as his father's apprentice and assistant. His older brother, Isaac Robert, also followed in the family business as a caricaturist and illustrator. Cruikshank's early work was caricature; but in 1823, at the age of 31, he started to focus on book illustration. He illustrated the first, 1823 English translation (by Edgar Taylor and David Jardine) of Grimms' Fairy Tales, published in two volumes as German Popular Stories. On 16 October 1827, he married Mary Ann Walker (1807–1849). Two years after her death, on 7 March 1851, he married Eliza Widdison. The two lived at 263 Hampstead Road, North London.Upon his death, it was discovered that Cruikshank had fathered 11 illegitimate children with a mistress named Adelaide Attree, his former servant, who lived close to where he lived with his wife. Adelaide was ostensibly married and had taken the married surname 'Archibold'.

Pour bien comprendre la portée de l'intervention et de l'influence de l'?uvre de Delacroix dans l'école fran?aise, il est nécessaire de se rappeler la situation exacte de la peinture au moment où il parut.??La Révolution avait brutalement traité les ma?tres du XVIIIème siècle finissant. ?prise d'un sévère idéal gréco-romain, dont déjà Vien avait donné des exemples et que David allait porter à son apogée, la génération jacobine avait considéré les peintres légers et délicieux du règne de Louis XVI comme les bénéficiaires de la corruption luxueuse des nobles et des fermiers généraux, et elle les avait rejetés dans le même mouvement d'injuste fureur. Fragonard mourait oublié, chassé de son logis des galeries du Louvre. Hubert Robert échappait gr?ce à une erreur à l'échafaud. Greuze mourait dans la misère noire. On ne parlait plus de Chardin. Un Latour se vendait quelques francs. ??L'?Embarquement pour Cythère?, peint par Watteau pour son entrée à l'Académie, y était criblé de boulettes de papier m?ché par les élèves de David, neveu de Boucher dont ils parlaient en de tels termes, qu'il était obligé, par pudeur, d'excuser à leurs yeux son oncle. Les gravures de Cochin, de Lépicié, de Choffard, de Lavreince, des Saint-Aubin, de Debucourt, de Gravelot, d'Eisen, allaient s'ensevelir dans les soupentes de quelques brocanteurs, et on attendrait quatrevingts ans avant de les rechercher pour les couvrir d'or. Un siècle s'effondrait. Son go?t exquis, sa morale profondément naturelle et humaine, son libéralisme sceptique, tout lui était imputé à vice et à crime. On rêvait d'un art moralisateur, que Greuze avait préparé aux applaudissements de Diderot par ses scènes familiales et son ingénuité bourgeoise, mêlée de libertinage hypocrite. ??On voulait un art héro?que, sévère, propre à élever les consciences. David apparut l'homme d'une telle ?uvre, et créa d'un seul effort la réaction d'une esthétique néo-romaine, d'une peinture con?ue d'après la statuaire antique, et toute consacrée à des expressions de sentiments cornéliens. La discipline de cette école fut plus dure encore que celle imposée, centvingtcinq années auparavant, par Louis XIV, Le Brun et l'école de Rome. Plus de recherches de la nature, plus de gr?ce, plus de vérité, plus de coloris, mais simplement un art allégorique, pompeux, aride, éloigné de la vie et tout entier construit sur des théories, un art aussi opposé que possible au tempérament fran?ais.

According to Wikipedia: "A Defence of Poetry is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840) [1839]. It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".

Shakespeare-Kom?die, ins Deutsche übersetzt. Laut Wikipedia: "Ein Sommernachtstraum ist ein Stück, das von William Shakespeare geschrieben wurde. Es soll zwischen 1590 und 1596 geschrieben worden sein. Es zeigt die Ereignisse um die Hochzeit des Herzogs von Athen, Theseus und der K?nigin von die Amazonen, Hippolyta.Sie schlie?en die Abenteuer von vier jungen athenischen Liebhabern und einer Gruppe von 6 Laiendarstellern ein, die von den Feen, die den Wald bewohnen, in dem das meiste Stück spielt, manipuliert werden.Das Stück ist eines von Shakespeares beliebtesten Werken für die Bühne und wird auf der ganzen Welt weit verbreitet. "

Biography, first published in1905. According to Wikipedia: "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers. Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty; at 17 he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and the Requiem. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons. Mozart learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate—the whole informed by a vision of humanity "redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute."[2] His influence on subsequent Western art music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."

According to Wikipedia: "Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Zora Neale Hurston on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans."

Alexander Pope's verse translation (rhyming couplets). With 28 illustrations by John Flaxman. According to Wikipedia: "Homer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was a historical individual, but modern scholars are skeptical: no reliable biographical information has been handed down from classical antiquity, and the poems themselves manifestly represent the culmination of many centuries of oral story-telling and a well-developed "formulaic" system of poetic composition. According to Martin West, "Homer" is "not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name." The poems are now widely regarded as the culmination of a long tradition of orally composed poetry, but the way in which they reached their final written form, and the role that an individual poet, or poets, played in this process is disputed... Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson... John Flaxman R.A. (6 July 1755 – 7 December 1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman, and a leading figure in British and European Neoclassicism. Early in his career he worked as a modeller for Josiah Wedgwood's pottery. He spent several years in Rome, where he produced his first book illustrations. He was a prolific maker of funerary monuments."

Byron's classic narrative poem. According to Wikipedia: "George Gordon Byron, later Noel, 6th Baron Byron FRS (1788 – 1824) was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems When We Two Parted, She Walks in Beauty, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest European poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond. Byron's fame rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, and marital exploits. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later traveled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever in Messolonghi in Greece."

First published in 1878. Chapters cover: Bach, Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Web, Mendelssohn, and Wagner.

Chapters cover: Palestrixa, Puccini, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Cherubini, Meiuel, Spontini, Halevy, Boieldieu, Auber, Meyerbeer, Founod, Thomas, and Berlioz. First published in 1878

According to Wikipedia: "The Imaginary Invalid (French: Le malade imaginaire) is a 1673 three-act comédie-ballet by the French playwright Molière with dance sequences and musical interludes by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. It was originally choreographed by Pierre Beauchamp. Molière had fallen out with the powerful court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, with whom he had pioneered the comédie-ballet form a decade earlier, and had opted for the collaboration with Charpentier, Lully's rival and arguably a more gifted composer. Le malade imaginaire would turn out to be his last work. He collapsed during his fourth performance as Argan on 17 February and died soon after. Beyond the obvious irony, given the play's title, it is possible that Molière was poisoned by Lully, or at the jilted collaborator's instigation."

1411/5000 Le drame classique a d'abord joué et publié en 1830. La pièce elle-même est en fran?ais, mais l'introduction est en anglais. Selon Wikipedia: ? Hernani est un drame du poète fran?ais Victor Hugo Le jeu est ouvert à Paris le 25 Février, 1830 Aujourd'hui est le drame pour les manifestations qui ont accompagné la première, et pour l'opéra de Verdi Ernani l'inspiration que pour son .. mérites est ... Victor-Marie Hugo (26 Février 1802-1822 mai 1885) était un poète fran?ais, auteur dramatique, romancier, essayiste, artiste plasticien, homme d'?tat, des militants des droits de l'homme et des représentants du mouvement romantique en France en France, Hugo est littéraire renommée principalement de ses poèmes, mais aussi de ses romans et ses Leistungen.Von dramatique de nombreux livres de poésie sont Contemplations et la Légende des particulièrement élevé en siècle le prestige et Hugo parfois, il est considéré comme le plus grand poète fran?ais, ses ?uvres les plus célèbres hors de France les romans Les Misérables et Notre-Dame de Paris (aussi connu comme le bossu de Notre-Dame) royal quand il était jeune, Hugo est devenu plus libéral que les décennies passées; il est devenu un partisan passionné de républicanisme, et son travail touche les questions les plus politiques et sociales et les tendances artistiques de son époque. Il est enterré au Panthéon. "

Drame classique dans le texte original, publié en 1832. Selon Wikipedia: "Victor-Marie Hugo (26 février 1802 - 22 mai 1885) était un poète, dramaturge, romancier, essayiste, artiste visuel, homme d'?tat, militant des droits de l'homme et En France, la renommée littéraire de Hugo vient en premier lieu de sa poésie, mais repose aussi sur ses romans et ses réalisations dramatiques Parmi les nombreux volumes de poésie, Les Contemplations et La Légende des siècles tiennent particulièrement haut dans l'estime critique, et Hugo est parfois identifié comme le plus grand poète fran?ais.A l'extérieur de la France, ses ?uvres les plus connues sont les romans Les Misérables et Notre-Dame de Paris (connu aussi en anglais sous le nom de Le Bossu de Notre Dame). était jeune, Hugo devint plus libéral au fil des décennies, il devint un partisan passionné du républicanisme et son travail touche à la plupart des questions politiques et sociales et aux tendances artistiques de son temps. Il est enterré au Panthéon. "