Composers Quotes

“Beethoven introduced us to anger. Haydn taught us capriciousness, Rachmaninoff melancholy. Wagner was demonic. Bach was pious. Schumann was mad, and because his genius was able to record his fight for sanity, we heard what isolation and the edge of lunacy sounded like. Liszt was lusty and vigorous and insisted that we confront his overwhelming sexuality as well as our own. Chopin was a poet, and without him we never would have understood what night was, what perfume was, what romance was.”
― Doris Mortman, The Wild Rose

“Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art.”
― Robert Schumann, Advice To Young Musicians

“He was a six and a half foot scowl.

(on Rachmaninov)”
― Igor Stravinsky

“He gives me the impression of being a spoilt child.

(on Liszt)”
― Clara Schumann

“So you’re a real person! I always thought you were a legendary figure, like unicorns or Giuseppe Verdi.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“A brilliant mind was first a listener that observed the actions of the people that loved and hated them, then found a way to express their feelings, when real communication was lost.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Something is conscious of us. It listens as it plays upon the
instruments that we are. It takes delight in the cacophony, an
orchestration so grand it is far beyond our contemplation. It is
masterful, elegant, swift, and awesome. It is the Song of the
Universe—and more. It is our Composer, and one who loves
beyond conditions, beyond the beyond. If the law of ‘as above, so
below’ holds true, then we too are composers. We too sing songs
that breathe shape into reality. But are we listening? Are we
paying attention to the compositions we create?”
― Dielle Ciesco, The Unknown Mother: A Magical Walk with the Goddess of Sound

“History's greatest composers world be rolling in their graves if they knew that their beautiful compositions were reduced to distorted hold music.”
― Michael P. Naughton, Deathryde: Rebel Without a Corpse

“Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, author, musician/composer, tantric teacher, mystic, animal rights activist, and counter-culture icon known by her mononymous artist name, ZEENA. Her work stems from her experience within the esoteric, shamanistic and magical traditions of which she's practiced, taught and been initiated. She is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist yogini, teaches at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft Berlin and is the spiritual leader of the Sethian Liberation Movement (SLM).”
― Zeena Schreck

“History's greatest composers would be appalled to hear their greatest works reduced to distorted hold music for businesses.”
― Michael P. Naughton

“Our DNA has a galactic history. True writers, composers, fine artists writers, who go deep within themselves, bring forth galactic information. We are soul-libraries of the galaxy.”
― Laurence Galian, 666: Connection with Crowley

“There are not any composers like Bach. There's just Bach.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Having considered Handel's tumultuous opera career and his first term at Covent Garden in the 1730s, perhaps we may dare to suggest he was one of the foremost pioneers in establishing autonomy within the traditional system of music patronage, notwithstanding his efforts to become an independent impressario often proved disappointing.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Handel's Path to Covent Garden

“Handel's yearning for independence from the traditional chains of patronage and his persistence in monitoring his productions resulted with unique developments concerning Baroque 'opera seria'; however, paradoxically his personal obsession to obtain complete artistic freedom generated disastrous side-effects that eventually impeded the progress of opera in London.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Handel's Path to Covent Garden

“The musical equivalent of St Pancras Station.

(on Elgar)”
― Thomas Beecham

“All Bach's last movements are like the running of a sewing machine.

(on Bach)”
― Arnold Bax

“The moment you begin to start feeling the need to protect your emotions from the disappointment of a person is the moment you need to wake up and stop the fantasy you created by removing them out of your life.”
― Marlan Rico Lee

“The Comte de Chagny was right; no gala performance ever equalled this one. All the great composers of the day had conducted their own works in turns. Faure and Krauss had sung; and on that evening, Christine Daaé had revealed her true self, for the first time, to the astonished and and enthusiastic audience. Gounod had conducted the Funeral March of a Marionette; Reyer, his beautiful overture to Siguar; Saint Saëns, the Danse Macabre and a Rêverie Orientale, Massenet, an unpublished Hungarian march; Guiraud, his Carnaval; Delibes, the Valse lente from Sylvia and the Pizzicati from Coppelia. Mlle. Krauss had sung the bolero in the Vespri Siciliani; and Mlle. Denise Bloch the drinking song in Lucrezia Borgia.
But the real triumph was reserved for Christine Daaé, who had begun by singing a few passages from Romeo and Juliet. It was the first time that the young artist sang in this work of Gounod, which had not been transferred to the Opera and which was revived at the the old Theatre Lyrique by Mme. Carvalho. Those who heard her say that her voice, in these passages, was seraphic; but this was nothing to the superhuman notes that she gave forth in the prison scene and the final trio in Faust, which she sang in the place of La Carlotta, who was ill. No one had ever heard or seen anything like it.
Daaé revealed a new Margarita that night, a Margarita of a splendor, a radiance hitherto unsuspected. The whole house went mad, rising to it its feet, shouting, cheering, clapping, while Christine sobbed and fainted in the arms of her fellow-singers and had to be carried to her dressing-room. A few subscribers, however, protested. Why had so great a treasure been kept from them all that time? Till then, Christine Daaé had played a good Siebel to Carlotta's rather too splendidly material Margarita. And it had needed Carlotta's incomprehensible and inexcusable absence from this gala night for the little Daaé, at a moment's warning, to show all that she could do in a part of the programme reserved for the Spanish diva! Well, what the subscribers wanted to know was, why had Debienne and Poligny applied to Daaé, when Carlotta was taken ill? Did they know of her hidden genius? And, if they knew of it, why had they kept it hidden? And why had she kept it hidden? Oddly enough, she was not known to have a professor of singing at that moment. She had often said she meant to practice alone for the future. The whole thing was a mystery.”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”
― ledwig van beethoven

“There are only
two types of composers:
composing composers
and decomposing composers.”
― Lera Auerbach, Excess of Being

“Arnold Schönberg, the inventor of atonal music, gave concerts which might not be comprehensible but were obviously important.”
― Eva Ibbotson, The Morning Gift

“The century of airplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.”
― Claude Debussy

“I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.”
― Claude Debussy