Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.
No dignity, no learning, no force of character,
can make any stand against good wit.
( Emerson )
The hardest thing in the world to endure is the applause of fools.
( Robert Schumann )
If there's anyone here whom I've not offended, my sincere apologies.
( Brahms )
Playing the organ is simple.
You just press the right keys at the right time
and the instrument practically plays itself!
( Bach )
The composing of fugues is the art of making musical skeletons.
( Beethoven )
I compare a good melodist to a fine race horse,
a contrapuntist to a hack post-horse.
( Mozart )
Well, it can be played that way too.
( Brahms, after hearing a questionable interpretation of one of his pieces. )
"Form follows profit" is the aesthetic principle of our times.
( Richard Rogers )
Economics and art are strangers.
( Willa Cather )
Today it's not culture; it's box office.
( Alex North )
There is no such thing as the Avant-Garde – only those who are a little behind.
( Hindemith )
The public doesn’t want new music;
the main thing it demands from a composer is that he is dead.
( Honneger )
The Soviet authorities … hailed it only because of the D major at the end.
( Ashkenazy, on Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony )
I can wait.
( Schönberg, when told the pianist would need to grow
an additional finger on each hand to perform one of his pieces. )
It [Music] is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
( Samuel Johnson )
Jazz is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
( Herb Pomeroy )
I write music as a sow piddles.
( Mozart )
Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
( Edgard Varese )
I think of Shostakovich as the second,
or even third, pressing of Mahler.
( Boulez )
At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.
( Berlioz )
I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists
as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.
( Queen Victoria )
Flint must be an extremely wealthy town:
I see that each of you bought two or three seats.
( Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan. )
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the musician.
( G. K. Chesterton )
Hell is full of amateurs; music is the brandy of the damned.
( George Bernard Shaw )
Only sick music makes money today.
( Nietzsche )
Parsifal – the kind of opera that starts at 6 o’clock
and after it’s been going for three hours,
you look at your watch and it says 6:20.
( David Randolph )
In Hollywood, Haydn would have been credited
as the composer of Variations on a Theme by Haydn
and Brahms as their “arranger.”
( Stravinsky )
The trick, of course, is to choose one’s commissions,
to compose what one wants to compose
and to get it commissioned afterward.
( Stravinsky )
Legato is for Europe,
Staccato is for America
( Gershwin )
If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it out by one's conversation.
( Oscar Wilde )
A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
( Elvis Presley )
A hack in a trance.
( Gershkovich, on Shostakovich )
The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all,
but it is the most difficult to play.
( Richard Strauss )
Talent works, Genius creates.
( Robert Schumann )
The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
What you are, you are by accident of birth;
what I am, I am by myself.
There are and will be a thousand princes;
there is only one Beethoven.
( Beethoven )
Film music is significant in many ways, of course, but not as music,
which is why the proposition that better composers
could produce better film music
is not necessarily true:
the standards of the category defeat higher standards.
( Stravinsky )
Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
I think popular music in this country is one of the few things
in the twentieth century that has made giant strides in reverse.
( Bing Crosby )
Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently
resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism.
Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding
between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.
( Glenn Gould )
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench,
a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free,
and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
( Hunter S. Thompson )
All the arts in America are a gigantic racket
run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
When a man abandons himself to music, he begins to melt and liquefy.
( Plato )
Only a lunatic would dance when sober.
( Cicero )
People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports and elevators,
cannot concentrate on a Beethoven quartet.
( Lutoslawski )
It’s about F minor.
( Vaughan Williams, when asked what his Fourth Symphony was about )
Many live in the ivory tower called reality;
they never venture on the open sea of thought.
( Francois Gautier )
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I'm frightened of the old ones.
( John Cage )
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
( Stravinsky )
My music is not modern, it is just badly played.
( Schönberg )
Tonality is just a habit.
( John Tenney )
The world,
bludgeoned by entertainment and suffocating on pop culture,
yearns for Art.
( Mikkelsen )
I can set a newspaper to music
( Rameau )
Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.
( Rossini )
I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.
( Ellington )
Hurry? I never hurry. I have no time to hurry!
( Stravinsky )
My sole inspiration is a phone call from a producer.
( Cole Porter )
No good opera plot can be sensible,
for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
( WH Auden )
When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I’m slipping.
( Maria Callas )
I am no more humble than my talents require.
( Oscar Levant )
I don’t know if I like it; but it is what I meant.
( Vaughan Williams, on his own Fourth Symphony )
Gentleman, if this is modern music, you can keep it!
( Vaughan Williams, during a rehearsal of his own 4th Symphony )
No, it’s a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it’s right.
( Vaughan Williams,
to a musician’s questioning of a certain note in his Fourth Symphony )
We have art in order not to die of life.
( Camus )
Artists who are enamored of practice without science
are like sailors who board a ship without rudder and compass,
never having any certainty as to whither they go.
( da Vinci )
I consider sincerity to be the greatest defect in art,
because it excludes the possibility of choice.
An artist cannot be sincere.
( Ravel )
An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
( James Whistler )
No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
( Beethoven )
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
( Mark Twain )
What a good thing it isn’t music.
( Rossini, on Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique )
No operatic star has yet died soon enough for me.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
( Arturo Toscanini, to a trumpet player )
An exotic and irrational entertainment.
( Samuel Johnson, on opera )
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
( Robert Benchley )
Wagner’s art is sick … Wagner is a great injury to music.
( Friedrich Nietzsche )
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 )
Time is a great teacher who kills all of its pupils.
( Berlioz )
[Art is] a product of the untalented,
sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
( Al Capp )
Composing a piece of music is very feminine.
It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative.
By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine.
( Barbara Kolb )
Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.
( Rossini )
I'd hate for this to get out, but I really like opera.
( Ford Frick )
What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?
( Nathaniel Hawthorne )
No sane man will dance.
( Cicero )
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.
( Joseph Roux )
We all know that Art is not truth.
Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth,
at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
( Picasso )
Art is a beautiful lie.
( Ravel )
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is nonetheless true
that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
( Oscar Wilde )
A work of art that contains theories
is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
( Marcel Proust )
If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that,
in five years he will be ready to commit murder.
( Walter Damrosch, on Aaron Copland )
Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.
( Piatro Mascagni )
Without music life would be a mistake.
( Nietzsche )
Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
( Beethoven )
Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.
( James Gibbons Hunekar )
To listen is an effort, and just to hear has no merit. A duck hears also.
( Stravinsky )
Wagner’s art can never completely die. It will suffer that inevitable decay,
the cruel mark of time on all beautiful things; yet noble ruins must remain,
in the shadow of which our grandchildren will brood
over the past splendor of this man, who, if he had been a little more human,
would have been altogether great.
( Debussy )
Oh how wonderful, really wonderful, opera would be if there were no singers!
( Rossini )
In opera, there is always too much singing.
( Debussy )
I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris,
or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.
( Chopin )
Already too loud!
( Bruno Walter, at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra,
on seeing the players first reaching for their instruments. )
I never use a score when conducting my orchestra.
Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
( Dmitri Mitropolous )
This is a stupid Punch-and-Judy show, which is much too poor
for children over seven years of age;
moreover, it is not music.
( Leo Tolstoy, on Siegfried )
You can't possibly listen to the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.
( Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket. )
Rossini would have become a great composer if his teacher