I have some romantic ones too - heavily romanticized, so be warned! Two from Jean Paul (Richter)'s novel Titan, based on which Mahler initially titled his first symphony:
"Ah, thou dear one! what is more painfully and longer sought, then, than a heart? When man stands before the sea and on mountains, and before pyramids and ruins, and in the presence of misfortune, and feels himself exalted, then does he stretch out his arms after the great Friendship. And when music, and moonlight, and spring and spring tears softly move him, then his heart dissolves, and he wants Love. And he who has never sought either is a thousand times poorer than he who has lost both."
"But to me, when I hear music, it is as if I heard a loud past or a loud future. Music has something holy; unlike the other arts, it cannot paint anything but what is good." (He added as a note: "This proposition, that pure music, without text, cannot represent anything immoral, deserves to be more investigated and developed by me.")
And from De Quincey:
"I am satisfied that music involves a far greater mystery than we are aware of. It is that universal language which binds together all creatures, and binds them by a profounder part of their nature than anything merely intellectual ever could."
And again, from a character in a dialogue written by him:
"Somebody once said, that to a deaf person who cannot hear the music, a set of dancers must look like so many patients for a mad-house; but, in my opinion, this dreadful music itself, this twirling and whirling and pirouetting of half a dozen notes, each treading on its own heels, in those accursed tunes which ram themselves into our memories, yea, I might say, mix themselves up with our very blood, so that one cannot get rid of their taint for many a miserable day after--this to me is the very trance of madness; and if I could ever bring myself to think dancing endurable, it must be dancing to the tune of silence."
Then, from Nietzche's Human, All-Too-Human, a few reflections on composers and music.
"In so far as we do not hear Bach's music as perfect and experienced in connoisseurs of counterpoint and al the varieties of the fugal style (and accordingly must dispense with real artistic enjoyment), we shall feel in listening to his music - in Goethe's magnificent phrase - as if 'we were present at God's creation of the world.' In other words, we feel here that something great is in the making but not yet made - our mighty modern music, which by conquering nationalities, the Church, and counterpoint, has conquered the world. In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism. He stands on the threshold of modern European music, but turns from thence to look at the middle ages."
"Händel, who in the invention of his music was bold, original, truthful, powerful, inclined to and akin to all the heroism of which a nation is capable, often proved stiff, cold, na even weary of himself in composition. He applied a few well-tried methods of execution, wrote copiously and quickly, and was glad when he was finished - but that joy was not the joy of God and other creators in the eventide of their working day."
"So far as genius can exist in a man who is merely good, Haydn had genius. He went just as far as the limit which morality sets to intellect, and only wrote that has 'no past'."
"Beethoven's music often appears like a deeply emotional meditation on unexpectedly hearing once more a piece long thought to be forgotten, 'Tonal Innocence': it is music about music. In the song of the beggar and the child in the street, in the monotonous airs of vagrant Italians, in the dance of the village inn or in carnival nights he discovers his melodies. He stores them together like a bee, snatching here and there some notes or a short phrase. To him these are hallowed memories of the 'better world', likes the ideas of Plato. Mozart stands in quite a different relation to his melodies. He finds his inspiration not in hearing music but in gazing at life, at the most stirring life of southern lands. He was always dreaming of Italy, when he was not there."
"Franz Schubert, inferior as an artist to the other great musicians, had nevertheless the largest share of inherited musical wealth. He spent it with a free hand and a kind heart, so that for a few centuries musicians will continue to nibble at his ideas and inspirations. In his works we find a store of unused inventions; the greatness of others will lie in making use of those inventions. If Beethoven may be called the ideal listener for a troubadour, Schubert has a right to be called the ideal troubadour."
"Felix Mendelssohn's music is the music of the good taste that enjoys all the tood things that have ever existed. It always points behind. How could it have much 'in front', much of a future? - But did he want it to have a future? He possessed a virture rare among artists, that of gratitude without arrière-pensée. This virtue, too, always points behind."
"[The] stripling was completely translated into song and melody by Robert Schumann, the eternal youth, so long as he felt himself in full possession of his powers. There are indeed moments when his music reminds one of the enteral 'old maid'."
"The music of today. This ultra-modern music, with its strong lungs and weak nerves, is frightened above all things of itself."
"As friends of music. Ultimately we are and remain good friends with music, as we are with the light of the moon. Neither, after all, tries to supplant the sun: they only want to illumine our nights to the best of their powers. Yet we may jest and laugh at them, may we not? Just a little, at least, from time to time? At the man in the moon, at the woman in music?"
And from Theodor Adorno's essays:
"The majority of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth. The usual view explains this with the argument that they are products of an uninhibited subjectivity, or, better yet, 'personality,' which breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering, and disdaining sensual charms with the sovereign self-assurance of the spirit liberated." (From an essay on Beethoven's late works.)
"The [Mahlerian] march is meant for the collective and for moving in solidarity - but heard from the perspective of the individual. It does not give orders so much as it carries you along; and if it carries along even the meanest things and those that are the most mutilated, it does not itself mutilate. The individual who is carried along is not eliminated. The community of lovers is made available to him. The human being survives in the march on the strength of the variant, the determining symmetry - this is what makes it so completely impossible to misuse Mahler's music. The men who otherwise were simply forced to die when they fell out of linfe, the line above Strasbourg's trenches; the nighttime sentry, the [soldier] who is laid to rest in the beauty of the cornets, and the poor little drummer boy - Mahler forms them out of freedom. He promises victory to the losers. All his symphonic music is a reveille. Its hero is the deserter."
"The difficulties that Schoenberg had to endure can scarcely be exaggerated. Once again as happened repeatedly in his life, he had to forget what he knew in order to be able to do it truthfully." (On Schoenberg first starting to write using the twelve-tone technique.)
