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Quote by Guy de Maupassant

Work

Bel-Ami

Georges Duroy, a young and ambitious man, navigates the Parisian high society of the 1860s, using his charm and cunning to rise to the top. The story delves into the complexities of human nature and the corrupting influence of power and wealth. more

Author

Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant, born on August 5, 1850 and died on July 6, 1893, was a renowned French novelist and master of the short story, often hailed as the 'King of Short Stories'. With his keen observation and unique writing style, Maupassant produced a vast array of short stories reflecting social realities and human weaknesses, which have had a profound impact on literature. more

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“The concentrated structure of musical form, based on dramatic climaxes, gradually breaks up in romanticism and gives way again to the cumulative composition of the older music. Sonata form falls to pieces and is replaced more and more often by other, less severe and less schematically moulded forms—by small-scale lyrical and descriptive genres, such as the Fantasy and the Rhapsody, the Arabesque and the Étude, the Intermezzo and the Impromptu, the Improvisation and the Variation. Even extensive works are often made up of such miniature forms, which no longer constitute, from the structural point of view, the acts of a drama, but the scenes of a revue. A classical sonata or symphony was the world in parvo: a microcosm. A succession of musical pictures, such as Schumann’s Carnaval or Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, is like a painter’s sketch-book; it may contain magnificent lyrical-impressionistic details, but it abandons the attempt to create a total impression and an organic unity from the very beginning. [...] This change of form is accompanied by the literary inclinations of the composers and their bias towards programme music. The intermingling of forms also makes itself felt in music and is expressed most conspicuously in the fact that the romantic composers are often very gifted and important writers. In the painting and poetry of the period the disintegration of form does not proceed anything like so quickly, nor is it so far-reaching as in music. The explanation of the difference is partly that the cyclical ‘medieval’ structure had long since been overcome in the other arts, whereas it remained predominant in music until the middle of the eighteenth century, and only began to yield to formal unity after the death of Bach. In music it was therefore much easier to revert to it than, for example, in painting where it was completely out of date. The romantics’ historical interest in old music and the revival of Bach’s prestige had, however, only a subordinate part in the dissolution of strict sonata form, the real reason is to be sought in a change of taste which was in essentials sociologically conditioned.”

UnityRevivalRomanticismBachFragmentism
Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
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