19th-century Conductor Quotes

Richard Wagner

Igor Stravinsky

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Max Reger

Pablo Casals

John Philip Sousa

Anton Webern

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.

To love as Christ loves is to let our love be a practical and not a sentimental thing.

Charles Villiers Stanford

The works of the creative spirit last, they are essentially imperishable, while the world-stirring historical activities of even the most eminent men are circumscribed by time.

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,
Funky butt, funky butt, take it away!

Too many students who are technically quite far advanced do not properly interpret the technically less difficult pieces they play, because they regard them as beneath serious consideration. This is a fundamental error in musical taste and judgment.

Nothing is more difficult than talking about music: if it is a prickly business for musicians, it is almost impossible for anyone else—the strongest, subtlest minds go astray.

Camille Saint-Saëns

The highest reaches of music come thrillingly close to the central core and essence of life itself.

Leopold Stokowski

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.

John Philip Sousa

Do not forget to dare the impossible in order to achieve the possible.

Anton Rubinstein

I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo.

Responding to another negative review by the music critic Rudolph Louis:

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 smoked my first cigarette and kissed my first woman on the same day. I have never had time for tobacco since.

Arturo Toscanini

Up with your damned nonsense will I put twice, or perhaps once, but sometimes always, by God, never.

Music is the art of sounds in the movement of time.

Ferruccio Busoni

The ability to conduct is a gift of God with which few have been endowed in full measure.

And the works that endure and will endure for ever, the great masterpieces, cannot have come into being as humanity... imagines. Man is only the vessel into which is poured what "nature in general" wants to express.

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.

Igor Stravinsky

I regret they don't have symphony orchestras all over the world so I could see Burma and Samarkand.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.