“I may not be a first-class composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” -Richard Strauss
“Here rests the honourable and virtuous youth Guntram, singer of love songs who by the symphonic orchestra of his own father was cruelly stricken down. Rest in Peace.” -Richard Strauss
“I won’t do it, I’m a decent woman.” -Marie Wittich, after the first rehearsal of Salome
“He never, I believe, conducted an opera without cuts, and was particularly proud when he could leave out a whole act of a modern opera.” -Richard Strauss on conductor Ernst von Schuch
“The aria, after all, is the soul of opera.” -Richard Straus
“The upshot of that except in the case of abnormally pitched voices, was displacement, fatigue, intolerable strain, shattering tremolo, and finally, not, as could have been wished, total annihilation, but the development of an unnatural trick of making an atrociously disagreeable noise and inflicting it on the public as Italian singing.” -George Bernard Shaw on the high tessituras Verdi set for his baritone parts.
“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.” -W. H. Auden
“We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.” -Rebecca West
“Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.” -Claude Lévi-Strauss
“Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.” -Henry Miller
“I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.” -Havelock Ellis on Beethoven
” A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.” -Jean Genet
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.
-Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
“I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn’t. I have always found moralizing intolerable.” -Hermann Hesse
“If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn’t have to go to an osteopath, then there’s something wrong.” -Simon Rattle
“It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites—opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity—where energies flow smoothly in one direction—there will be much doing but no music.” -Eric Hoffer
“It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.” -Samuel Johnson on music
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” -Walter Pater
“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” -Charlie Parker
“Music is spiritual. The music business is not.” -Van Morrison
“Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.” -Frank Zappa
“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.” -Albert Camus
“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, & everlasting beauty of monotony.” -Benjamin Britten while listening to the last song in Mahler’s song cycle Das Lied von der Erde
“Alas! all music jars when the soul’s out of tune.” -Altisidora in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.” -Jean Cocteau
“Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.” -Sir Thomas Beecham
“There’s a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don’t know what it is. But I’ve got it.” -Ron Wood
“A nation creates music—the composer only arranges it.” -Mikhail Glinka
“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.” -Frank Zappa
“Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself.” -Erik Satie
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. . . . The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.” -W.H. Auden
“Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.” -Joseph Addison on Italian opera in 18th century England
“If I weren’t reasonably placid, I don’t think I could cope with this sort of life. To be a diva, you’ve got to be absolutely like a horse.” -Joan Sutherland
“I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.” -Franco Zeffirelli
“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.” -Lord Kenneth Clark
“Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.” -Georgia O’Keeffe
“This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.” -Horace, Roman poet
Swans sing before they die – ’twere no bad thing
Did certain persons die before they sing.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“To Strauss the composer, I take off my hat. To Strauss the man, I put it back on again.” -Toscanini after Richard Strauss accepted the presidency of the Nazi-established Reichsmusikkammer
“Dear Puccini, if this time you have not succeeded in hitting the nail squarely on the head, I will change my profession and sell salami!” -Giulio Ricordi (Puccini’s publisher) after seeing the score for La Bohème
“I am obliged to write an opera in fourteen days. I give you a week to do your share…But I warn you, we have a German prima donna, a tenor who stutters, a buffo with a voice like a goat, and a worthless French basso. Still, we must cover ourselves with glory.” -Gaetano Donizetti to his librettist, Felice Romani, about L’Elisir d’amore
“Handel is so great and so simple that no one but a professional musician is unable to understand him.” -Samuel Butler
“That’s good. It gives the aria some life.” -Giacomo Puccini after the original Tosca, Maria Jeritza, accidentally rolled off a couch right before Vissi d’arte, forcing her to sing the entire aria lying on the floor
“Who sent you to me? God?” -Giacomo Puccini after hearing then-unknown Enrico Caruso sing Recondita armonia for the first time
“Next time I shall write a Mozart opera.” -Richard Strauss after the first performance of Elektra
“There are plenty of good pieces waiting to be written in C major.” -Arnold Schoenberg
“My friend, you’ve a fine turn of speed – you’d have made a good conductor.” -Charles Gounod to a cabbie who gave him a particularly good ride
“You only have time to clamber up a tree and hold on like grim death. Your hair is blown about, your face is streaked with blood, but when the storm dies off and recedes a little, you get down from your shelter, you shake yourself and you enjoy the pleasure of having escaped a great danger. The hurricane, my dear child, is Wagner or Wagnerism. It is fearsome but it passes on. The important thing is not to let yourself be carried away…” -Charles Gounod
“Look, mon petit, I’ve bested you. Faust has made 20,000 francs this week and your Le Cid only 16,000…suicide’s the only thing left for you now…” -Charles Gounod joking his friend Massenet
“Performance is a crucifixion.” -Charles Gounod
“…passionate and romantic in the extreme. The revelation of German music to him is like a bomb falling on a house and it’s possible that it may cause him serious damage.” -Fanny Hensel about Charles Gounod
“I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.” -Ludwig von Beethoven
“When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it had missed the point.” -Maria Callas
“When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I’m slipping.” -Maria Callas
I am in the university library working on a project on contemporary American art song, and I came across this quote in one of my CD cases:
I really did look like hell. I feel (and look) slightly better today. At least my eyes aren’t as red and puffy.
