Music Monday: Lists XX

Ten pieces with musical cats in
1. Puss-in-Boots in Sleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky)
2. Cat Duet from L’enfant et les sortilèges (Ravel)
3. The Monk and his Cat (Barber)
4. Cat’s Fugue, Keyboard Sonata Kk30 (Domenico Scarlatti)
5. ‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’ in Rejoice in the Lamb (Britten)
6. ‘Mi-a-ou’ from Dolly Suite (Fauré)
7. Royal March of the Lion, in Carnival of the Animals (Saint-Saëns)
8. Peter and the Wolf (Prokofiev)
9. Sonata Representativa (Biber)
10. The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (Stravinsky)

Ten operatic ghosts
1. Smetana’s Dalibor – Zdenek’s ghost plays a violin in Dalibor’s prison cell
2. Weber’s Die Freischütz – Max doesn’t listen to the warnings of his mother’s ghost
3. Mozart’s Don Giovanni – The Commendatore’s ghost conveys the Don to hell
4. Thomas’s Hamlet – The ghost of the King of Denmark prevents Hamlet’s suicide
5. Verdi’s Macbeth – Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth at the banquet
6. Gounod’s Mireille – Ourrias is killed by a ghostly boatman
7. Pfitzner’s Palestrina – The ghost of Lucretia, his dead wife, gives inspiration
8. Rossini’s Semiramide – Husband Nino’s ghost points an accusing finger at his wife
9. Britten’s Turn of the Screw – Ghosts, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel seek domination
10. Puccini’s Le Villi – Anna’s ghost claims the faithless Roberto’s life

Ten flattering remaks made by composers
1. ‘The boy will cause us all to be forgotten.’ (Hasse about Mozart)
2. ‘The world will not have such a talent again in 100 years.’ (Haydn about Mozart)
3. ‘We must pay attention to this little chap; he’s goign to leave us standing.’ (Bizet about Massenet)
4. ‘The immortal God of harmony.’ (Beethoven about Bach)
5. ‘The inspired master of our art.’ (Gluck about Handel)
6. ‘It is possible to be as much of a musician as Saint-Saëns; it is impossible to be more of one!’ (Liszt about Saint-Saëns)
7. ‘Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!’ (Schumann about Chopin)
8. ‘Bruckner, he’s my man!’ (Wagner about Bruckner)
9. ‘Bach is the father, we the children.’ (Haydn about CPE Bach)
10. ‘Look out for this man’s music; he has something to say and knows how to say it.’ (Parry about Elgar)

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The Woman at Seven Brothers (part 4/4)

I got another match, sir, and scratched it on the brass. I gave it to the first wick, the little wick that’s inside all the others. It bloomed like a yellow flower. “I have?” I yelled, and gave it to the next.

Then there was a shadow, and I saw she was leaning beside me, her two elbows on the brass, her two arms stretched out above the wicks, her bare forearms and wrists and hands. I gave a gasp:

“Take care! You’ll burn them! For God’s sake—”

She didn’t move or speak. The match burned my fingers and went out, and all I could do was stare at those arms of hers, helpless. I’d never noticed her arms before. They were rounded and graceful and covered with a soft down, like a breath of gold. Then I heard her speaking close to my ear.

“Pretty arms,” she said. “Pretty arms!”

The Woman at Seven Brothers (part 3/4)

She went down the stair into the well, winding out of sight, and as long as I could see her, her eyes were watching mine. When I went, myself, after a few minutes, she was waiting for me on that first landing, standing still in the dark. She took hold of my hand, though I tried to get it away.

“Good-by,” said she in my ear.

“Good-by?” said I. I didn’t understand.

“You heard what he said to-day—about Kingdom Come? Be it so—on his own head. I’ll never come back here. Once I set foot ashore—I’ve got friends in Brightonboro, Ray.”

I got away from her and started on down. But I stopped. “Brightonboro?” I whispered back. “Why do you tell me?” My throat was raw to the words, like a sore.

“So you’d know,” said she.

Well, sir, I saw them off next morning, down that new Jacob’s-ladder into the dinghy-boat, her in a dress of blue velvet and him in his best cutaway and derby—rowing away, smaller and smaller, the two of them. And then I went back and sat on my cot, leaving the door open and the ladder still hanging down the wall, along with the boat-falls.

The Woman at Seven Brothers (part 2/4)

I turned and looked at her sidewise. She was standing by the railing, leaning a little outward, the top of her from the waist picked out bright by the lens behind her. I didn’t know what in the world to say, and yet I had a feeling I ought not to sit there mum.

“I wonder,” said I, “what that captain’s thinking of, fetching in so handy to-night. It’s no way. I tell you, if ’twasn’t for this light, she’d go to work and pile up on the ledge some thick night—”

She turned at that and stared straight into the lens. I didn’t like the look of her face. Somehow, with its edges cut hard all around and its two eyes closed down to slits, like a cat’s, it made a kind of mask.

“And then,” I went on, uneasy enough—”and then where’d all their music be of a sudden, and their goings-on and their singing—”

“And dancing!” She clipped me off so quick it took my breath.

“D-d-dancing?” said I.

“That’s dance-music,” said she. She was looking at the boat again.

“How do you know?” I felt I had to keep on talking.

The Woman at Seven Brothers (part 1/4)

I tell you sir, I was innocent. I didn’t know any more about the world at twenty-two than some do at twelve. My uncle and aunt in Duxbury brought me up strict; I studied hard in high school, I worked hard after hours, and I went to church twice on Sundays, and I can’t see it’s right to put me in a place like this, with crazy people. Oh yes, I know they’re crazy—you can’t tell me. As for what they said in court about finding her with her husband, that’s the Inspector’s lie, sir, because he’s down on me, and wants to make it look like my fault.

No, sir, I can’t say as I thought she was handsome—not at first. For one thing, her lips were too thin and white, and her color was bad. I’ll tell you a fact, sir; that first day I came off to the Light I was sitting on my cot in the store-room (that’s where the assistant keeper sleeps at the Seven Brothers), as lonesome as I could be, away from home for the first time, and the water all around me, and, even though it was a calm day, pounding enough on the ledge to send a kind of a woom-woom-woom whining up through all that solid rock of the tower. And when old Fedderson poked his head down from the living-room with the sunshine above making a kind of bright frame around his hair and whiskers, to give me a cheery, “Make yourself to home, son!” I remember I said to myself: “He’s all right. I’ll get along with him. But his wife’s enough to sour milk.” That was queer, because she was so much under him in age—’long about twenty-eight or so, and him nearer fifty. But that’s what I said, sir.