Composer Quotes

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Ludwig van Beethoven

Johann Sebastian Bach

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Frédéric Chopin

George Frideric Handel

Giuseppe Verdi

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

I have departed from this planet and I have left behind my poor earthly ones with their occupations which are as many as they are useless; at last I am living in the scintillating splendor of the stars, each of which used to seem to me as large as millions of suns.

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

Gioachino Rossini

This fact, the surfacing of structure in an undeliberate action, is too big to take on here, but it was enough to convince me that the structuralists—the advocates of planning music before you hear or care what the plan gives you—were right: do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid.

The silver swan, who, living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat.

Orlando Gibbons

According to my principles, every master has his true and certain value. Praise and criticism cannot change any of that. Only the work itself praises and criticizes the master, and therefore I leave to everyone his own value.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Like all music, the figured bass should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul; where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamour and ranting.

Johann Sebastian Bach

I too had to work hard, so as not to have to work hard any longer.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I never compose in the abstract; that is to say, the musical thought never appears otherwise than in a suitable external form. In this way I invent the musical idea and the instrumentation simultaneously.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Please accept a promise from me in his name that I will always live in the religion in which he died.

Giacomo Meyerbeer

To do good whenever one can, to love liberty above all else, never to deny the truth, even though it be before the throne.

Ludwig van Beethoven

"Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the "given" material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control."

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Arthur Honegger

On "Begin the Beguine":

It became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had. It was the first time that a so-called swing band played something melodic and still gave it a beat.

And Music is an art which likes people to laugh and sing and dance. It cares nothing for melancholy, nor for a man who sorrows over what is of no importance, but ignores, instead, such folk. It brings joy everywhere it's present; it comforts the disconsolate, and just hearing it makes people rejoice.

Guillaume de Machaut

Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.

See, the night doth enfold us! See, all the world lies sleeping!

Giacomo Puccini

When I'm shooting on location, you get ideas on the spot - new angles. You make not major changes but important modifications, that you can't do on a set. I do that because you have to be economical.

Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

Form is a theatrical event of a certain length, and the length itself may be unpredictable.

Christian Wolff

In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.

Modest Mussorgsky

Come again: sweet love doth now invite,
Thy graces that refrain,
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

You read reviews by top reviewers of films that not only had remarkably interesting scores, but films whose effectiveness was absolutely enhanced, and frequently created by the music, yet the reviewers seem unaware that their emotions and their nervous reactions to the films have been affected by the scoring. This is a serious flaw. Any film reviewer owes it to himself, and the public, to take every element of the film into account

Jerry Goldsmith

For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.

I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.