In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.
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Modest Mussorgsky, in a letter to Vladimir Stassov, October 18, 1872; Oskar von Riesemann (trans. Paul England) Moussorgsky (1929) p. 107.
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Beethoven I take twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day!
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius.
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Tchaikovsky, in his diary, October 9, 1886
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I listened more than I studied… therefore little by little my knowledge and ability were developed.
Daniel Barenboim (born 15 November 1942)
“Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.”
I don’t like volume for its own sake. Or the way the words are often drowned out by drums and amplifiers. I don’t like the amateur quality of some of the writing, and the out of tune singing. This music can be coarse, a victim of it’s own sameness. And yet, when it’s good, it’s irresistible, after all there are pros and cons to everything.
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Leonard Bernstein, on pop music
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He would lock himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, pacing back and forth, breaking his pens, repeating or changing one bar a hundred times, writing and erasing as many times, and beginning again the next day with an infinite and desperate perseverance. He sometimes spent six weeks on one page, only in the end to write it exactly as he had sketched at the first draft.
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George Sand describing Chopin
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Béla Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945)
“In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.”
Nino Rota (December 3, 1911 - April 10, 1979)
“When I’m creating at the piano, I tend to feel happy; but - the eternal dilemma - how can we be happy amid the unhappiness of others? I’d do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happiness. That’s what’s at the heart of my music.”
His name ought not to be Bach (brook), but Ocean, because of his infinite and inexhaustible wealth of tonal combinations and harmonies. Bach is the ideal of an organist.
That you are going to publish Sebastian Bach’s works is something which does good to my heart, which beats in love of the great and lofty art of this ancestral father of harmony; I want to see them soon.
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Beethoven, in a letter to the publisher Hofmeister, 1801.
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Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.
No metronome at all! He who has sound feeling needs none, and he who has not will get no help from the metronome;—he’ll run away with the orchestra anyway.
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Beethoven, upon realizing he had marked 2 different scores for his 9th symphony with completely different metronome markings.
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