"The G-major Concerto took two years of work, you know. The opening theme came to me on a train between Oxford and London. But the initial idea is nothing. The work of chiseling then began. We’ve gone past the days when the composer was thought of as being struck by inspiration, feverishly scribbling down his thoughts on a scrap of paper. Writing music is seventy-five percent an intellectual activity." -Ravel

"On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind." -Brahms, on Bach's Chacconne from Partita 2

"And why didn't they encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!" -Beethoven on his Große Fuge, I love this one lol

 

"Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the pieces of a bombed-out continent after WWII. But for some Americans in 1948 or 1958 or 1968--in the real context of tail-fins, Chuck Berry and millions of burgers sold--to pretend that instead we are going to have the dark brown angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie."

-Steve Reich

 

Max Reger, writing to a hostile critic: "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me."

 

I must admit this is one of my favorite quotes of all time!

 

If one has not heard Wagner at Bayreuth, one has heard nothing! Take lots of handkerchiefs because you will cry a great deal! Also take a sedative because you will be exalted to the point of delirium!
-- Gabriel Fauré

Not until the turn of the century did the outlines of the new world discovered in Tristan begin to take shape. Music reacted to it as a human body to an injected serum, which it at first strives to exclude as a poison, and only afterwards learns to accept as necessary and even wholesome.
-- Paul Hindemith

 

Speaking of Wagner...John Ruskin on Die Meistersinger: "Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, ... and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember in my life, by the stopping of any sound - not excepting railway whistles - as I was by the cessation of the cobbler's bellowing."

 

What a cruel man.

 

And just who on earth is this John Ruskin and who gave him the right to talk with such comtempt about the Master of all masters?

 

But Ruskin certainly had a way with words, you must admit !

 

"What?!" - Beethoven

 

Sir Thomas Beecham: "The sound of a harpsichord: two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm."

 

"If you want Richard, try Wagner, if Strauss, try Johann." - Glazunov

Get what he is implying? :tiphat:

 

"There are three levels of intelligence: 'stupido', 'stupidissimo', and 'tenore'." -- Arturo Toscanini

 

"Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration."
- Johannes Brahms

"Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge."
- Richard Wagner

"To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist."
- Robert Schumann
:angel:

 

"I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless *******!" -- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1886

 

"I am not a modern composer in the strictest sense of the word, because my music is an evolution, not a revolution. While I have always been receptive to new ideas in music, I have never tried to throw the laws of harmony and composition into the discard. On the contrary, I have always drawn inspiration generously from the masters. I have never stopped studying Mozart. To the greatest extent possible my music is built upon the traditions of the past and grows out of them..."

-Ravel

 

"In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music."
"Mozart is sunshine."
- Dvorak

"A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything."
- Gustav Mahler

 

"As soon as anyone says two words about music, one word will be wrong." -- Stravinsky

 

That snarky rascal Stravinsky.

 

Schumann describing Haydn: "...an old family friend whom one receives gladly and respectifully but who has nothing new to tell us."

 

That's the problem with being dead, I suppose.

 

Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

~Samuel Johnson

 

attributed to diva Zinka Milanov:

"Dollink, either you got the voice or you don't got the voice: and I got the voice."

 

Asked what he thought of Stockhausen, Sir Thomas Beecham replied that he thought he had trodden in some once.

 

More Beecham, on the topic of Beethoven's Seventh:

What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks jumping about.

 

"Karajan? He enthuses the masses. So does Coca Cola." --Sergiu Celibidache

 

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? -- Michael Torke

His music used to be original. Now it's aboriginal. -- Sir Ernest Newman on Igor Stravinsky

 

George Bernard Shaw again, and again on Brahms: "His wantonness is not vicious: it is that of a great baby, gifted enough to play with harmonies that would baffle most grown-up men, but still a baby, never more happy than when he has a crooning song to play with, always ready for the rocking horse and the sugar-stick, and tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise."

 

More Beecham! "Why do our British orchestras engage so many third-rate foreign guest conductors when we have so many second-rate conductors of our own?"