Hector Berlioz Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Hector Berlioz
How many of them handled the brush before being reduced to the broom?

Hector Berlioz
This sudden and unexpected revelation of Shakespeare overwhelmed me. The lightning-flash of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me, illuminating its remotest depths in a single flash. I recognized the meaning of real grandeur, real beauty, and the real dramatic truth.

Hector Berlioz
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz
Which of the two powers, Love or Music, can elevate man to the sublimest heights?... It is a problem, and yet it seems to me that this is the answer: 'Love can give no idea of music; music can give an idea of love.'... Why separate them? They are two wings of the soul.

Hector Berlioz
The author of The Prophet not only has the good luck to have talent, he has also the talent to have good luck.

Hector Berlioz
Instrumentation is to music precisely what color is to painting.

Hector Berlioz
That is, in fact, the true female voice of the orchestra – a voice at once passionate and chaste, heart-rending, yet soft, which can weep, sigh, and lament, chant, pray, and muse, or burst forth into joyous accents, as none other can do.

Hector Berlioz
I feel grateful to the happy chance which forced me to compose freely and in silence, and has thus delivered me from the tyranny of the fingers, so dangerous to thought.

Hector Berlioz
Of Critics:
Poor devils! Where do these unfortunate creatures come from? On what butcher's block will they meet their end? What reward does municipal munificence allot them for thus cleaning (or dirtying) the pavements of Paris? At what age are they sent to the glue factory? What becomes of their bones (their skin is good for nothing)?

Hector Berlioz
A singer who is able to sing even sixteen measures of good music in a natural and engaging way, effortlessly and in tune, without distending the phrase, without exaggerating accents to the point of caricature, without platitude, affectation, or coyness, without making grammatical mistakes, without illicit slurs, without hiatus or hiccup, without making insolent changes in the text, without barks or bleats, without sour notes, without crippling the rhythm, without absurd ornaments and nauseating appoggiaturas – in short, a singer able to sing these measures simply and exactly as the composer wrote them – is a rare, very rare, exceedingly rare bird.

Hector Berlioz
You request me to tell you… if it is true that the creed of all who profess to love high and serious art is: "There is no God but Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet"?

Hector Berlioz