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Quotes about Johann Sebastian Bach
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We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?
George Steiner
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There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment... only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.
Edward Weston
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Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
Lewis Thomas
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Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.
Ben Bagdikian
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When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.
Simon Van Booy
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Relativity does not mean everything is relative. And the brilliance of Einstein's discoveries is so great that no amount of journalistic overkill has managed to dim it. Einstein and Bach are the only two people who deserve their reputations.
Tony Rothman
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
Ezra Pound
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Bach is thus a terminal point. Nothing comes from him; everything merely leads to him.
Albert Schweitzer
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The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.
Lincoln Steffens
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It's a huge Carthusian monastery, stuck down between rocks and sea, where you may imagine me, without white gloves or hair curling, as pale as ever, in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gates. The cell is the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting, a small window... Bach, my scrawls and waste paper - silence - you could scream - there would still be silence. Indeed, I write to you from a strange place.
Frédéric Chopin
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I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can't listen to music while I write. It's too absorbing.
Cheryl Mendelson
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A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C. S. Lewis
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Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess).
Frédéric Chopin
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In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Perhaps Bach and Beethoven are strange bedfellows for Mickey Mouse, but it's all been a lot of fun.
Walt Disney
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If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach...
Aaron Copland
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When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.
Frank Lloyd Wright
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If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.
R. G. Collingwood
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First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.
Aldous Huxley
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Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: "To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby." That is what I would have liked to say about my work.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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I wouldn't play it in public — you need different muscles, you can't use the upper arm, just the fingers. But the sound has a glow, because the strings aren't damped, as on a piano. I wanted to visit Bach's sound world, then apply those ideas to the piano.
Murray Perahia
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On Bach:
If I had to vote for what is the greatest piece of music ever conceived by the human mind, I'd have a hard time choosing between the Chaconne that ends Bach's second partita for unaccompanied violin or the his Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue for the piano.
Harry Markowitz
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Let's take a look at the 25th variation of the second part. Here Bach meets us in his highest and deepest personal and human form: it's like in the Art of Fugue in the unfinished fugue No. 20, where Bach confronts us with his personal signature. It was he himself, who, after he had been occupied during his whole life with symbols, with numbers, with the mastering of structural and formal problems and renewals, now he saw himself confronted with a personal view into mirror. He now shows us a human being in his whole conception of life. The composer of Come, oh sweet death now is confessing, Oh sweet death, how bitter is your prickle.
Burkard Schliessmann
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I myself represent the style of a Bach who was a human being with all his heights and depths, who knew life very well. My Bach is the experience of my playing the whole literature; and filling the different voices with their own life, vitality, vividness; it's the independent speaking-until-singing of the different voices; and lastly it's a balance between pianistic virtuosity and something chamber-music-like.
Burkard Schliessmann
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As far as Bach is concerned, I never came close to liking him [-] My favourite composer is Scriabin -[and] his Fifth sonata, in my mind, the greatest piece of music ever written.
Henry Miller
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Quote of the day
Life is pain, highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.
William Goldman
Johann Sebastian Bach
Creative Commons
Born:
March 21, 1685
Died:
July 28, 1750
(aged 65)
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