# Composer Quotes



## TitanisWalleri (Dec 30, 2012)

I was wondering if anyone else had come across some moving quotes from composers. I think that quotes by composers can give us non-composers some insight into the life of a composer, the pressures, the emotion, etc. 

I would like to start with a quote by Mahler: "A symphony mus be like the world. It must include everything." Quite fitting for the man. :lol:

"...in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go we have gained everything."- Leonard Bernstein


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

I found a great quote today by Glazunov speaking on his mentors and colleagues:

"If I had to come up with a way of characterizing the music of our great Russian composers, I would compare Borodin with a knight-prince from pre-Muscovite times, Musorgsky with a thoughtful peasant, Rimsky-Korsakov with a sorcerer from our byliny [epic poems], but Tchaikovsky I would liken to a Russian gentleman (барин) of a Turgenevan cast of mind. Tchaikovsky adored the countryside, he liked and, from his point of view, understood the people. He knew how to strike up a rapport with them, and wherever he went they all liked him."


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music." - Rachmaninov


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## maestro57 (Mar 26, 2013)

"What I sh_t is better than anything you could ever think up." - Beethoven


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## TrevBus (Jun 6, 2013)

Hanns Eisler's reaction to "the steady production of new compositional techniques forced music into an isolated, even elite postion".

"The new and progressive in music has to some extent to be confronted with the real world. This means: a new musical material has to be able to justify its existence in the praxis of our everyday musical life".


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

"The exhilaration (of the electric guitar) comes largely from the fact that at the flick of a knob you can positively drown out any other colleague that happens to be playing with you, not the most musical or charming sentiments, but exciting none the less. As for the sound - musical sound - I frankly find that to be the most boring, lifeless, phoney, vulgar noise that could have ever been contrived by humankind on this planet."

--Julian Bream


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> "...Tchaikovsky I would liken to a Russian gentleman (барин) of a Turgenevan cast of mind. Tchaikovsky adored the countryside, he liked and, from his point of view, understood the people. He knew how to strike up a rapport with them, and wherever he went they all liked him."


Tchaikovsky himself was not short of opinions. A few:

On The Mighty Handful: "...a sad phenomenon... The young Petersburg composers are very gifted, but they are all impregnated with the most horrible presumptuousness and a purely amateur conviction of their superiority to all other musicians in the universe."

On Rimsky-Korsakov: The "one exception" who had discovered "that the doctrines preached by this circle had no sound basis, that their mockery of the schools and the classical masters, their denial of authority and of the masterpieces, was nothing but ignorance."

On Cui: "Cui is a gifted amateur. His music is not original, but graceful and elegant; it is too coquettish, made up so to speak. At first it pleases, but soon satiates us." "...he sails in shallow waters.'

On Borodin: "[He] also possesses talent, a very great talent, which however has come to nothing... He has less taste than Cui, and his technique is so poor that he cannot write a bar without assistance."

On Mussorgsky: "...used up" and liking "what is coarse, unpolished, and ugly... [but] his gifts are perhaps the most remarkable of all."

On Balakirev: "[He did] great harm...it was he who ruined Korsakov's early career by assuring him he had no need to study."

On Berlioz: "[The Damnation of Faust is] one of the miracles of art. Several times I had to suppress my sobs." "On the whole his musical nature does not attract me, and I cannot agree with the ugliness of some of his harmonies and modulations, but sometimes he reaches extraordinary heights."

On Wagner: "[He has] extraordinary gifts", but is a "symphonist" lost on the opera stage where "the music loses all power of expression." "Maybe the Ring is a great composition, but I have never heard anything so boring and so drawn out as this."

On Brahms: Some of his nicer opinions anyway. "He is certainly a great musician, even a master, but his mastery overwhelms his inspiration." A personal note: "He is very sympathetic and I like his honesty and open-mindedness."


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

KenOC said:


> On Brahms: Some of his nicer opinions anyway. "He is certainly a great musician, even a master, but his mastery overwhelms his inspiration." A personal note: "He is very sympathetic and I like his honesty and open-mindedness."


No doubt Glazunov helped him there with those opinions. 

Further comment on those quotes. The Five was really mean to Tchaikovsky for the most part, especially Balakirev, who was the meanest of all of them. Rimsky-Korsakov generally distrusted Tchaikovsky. NO doubt the "young Petersburg composers" mentioned also included Glazunov and Liadov, and both of them came to side with Tchaikovsky because he was nicer and more open-minded. The Five really _were_ bullies! But still fascinating bullies.

More on Tchaikovsky from Glazunov:
"It struck me that Tchaikovsky, who was above all a lyrical and melodic composer, had introduced operatic elements into his symphonies. I admired the thematic material of his works less than the inspired unfolding of his thoughts, his temperament and the constructural perfection."


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Just re-reading Michael Steen's 'The Great Composers' (we just bought it) & on page 70 came across Debussy's opinion of Bach:

*'When the old Saxon cantor has any ideas, he starts out from any old thing and is truly pitiless... If he'd had a friend - a publisher perhaps - who could have told him to take a day off every week, perhaps, then we'd have been spared several hundreds of pages in which you have to walk between rows of mercilessly regulated & joyless bars, each one with its rascally little "subject" & "countersubject".' *


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

The person behind this beautiful statement was a surprise to me:

"_I would not say that I am afraid of either life or death, but there is one thing I fear: to see my opinions be growing old-fashioned and to observe our young people setting sail on expeditions of which I fail to comprehend the meaning. In other words, I am afraid of the possibility that I may be unable to perceive the truth and greatness of some of the new intellectual frontiers, that form as we grow older. That is why I have an instinctal need to know all the nuances of today´s intellectual and artistic life, now more than ever before_."

a deep thinker in many ways;

- http://www.griegsociety.org/default.asp?kat=1022&id=4792&sp=2


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## Stavrogin (Apr 20, 2014)

Max Bruch: "The violin can sing a melody better than the piano can, and melody is the soul of music".


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## poconoron (Oct 26, 2011)

More from Tchaikovsky............on Mozart:

"Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music."

"Mozart is the musical Christ."

"I find consolation and rest in Mozart's music, wherein he gives expression to that joy of life which was part of his sane and wholesome temperament."


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

"The division of labour was very fair - one of us wrote the sharps and the other wrote the flats..."

Arthur Honegger on co-writing the opera "L'Aiglon" with Jacques Ibert.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

Ralph Vaughan Williams talking about his 4th symphony: _"I'm not at all sure that I like it myself now. All I know is that it's what I wanted to do at the time."_

RVW referring to various people who attempted to ascribe meaning to his 6th symphony: _"It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music"_


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)




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## Neo Romanza (May 7, 2013)

_"Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art." _- Claude Debussy


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

From Leonard Bernstein


"I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it''


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

"No on
e ever put up a statue to a music critic ". Jean Sibelius .


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

superhorn said:


> "No one ever put up a statue to a music critic ". Jean Sibelius .


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## RobertJTh (Sep 19, 2021)

One of the most misunderstood and vilified men in 19th century music. A brilliant mind, worthy of that statue!


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

Leonard Bernstein: “To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”


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## Neo Romanza (May 7, 2013)

_"Music is not a salvation, but it helps us endure --- endure until we can finally be laid to rest."_ - Allan Pettersson


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## Lisztianwagner (2 mo ago)

_"Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite." _

Richard Wagner


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

_Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal._
Igor Stravinsky


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## Tarneem (Jan 3, 2022)

"Pass my existence in solitude"

Beethoven


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

"I wish you music to help with the burdens of life, and to help you release your happiness to others." 
- Ludwig van Beethoven


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)




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## HenryPenfold (Apr 29, 2018)

Neo Romanza said:


> _"Music is not a salvation, but it helps us endure --- endure until we can finally be laid to rest."_ - Allan Pettersson


Says more about Pettersson's excruciating life than it does about music - which does nothing to devalue its truth.


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