anyone have composer/pianist quotes?

[musicsdarkangel]

I'm looking for good quotes from composers, pianists, violinists, etc.

Does anyone have any good ones?

I'm particularly looking for Rachmaninoff.


I actually stumbled across a quote online, actually which Boliver (coincidentally?  this guy is everywhere!) replied to on a messageboard for a Rach interview...I want to find this as well....


anyway, quotes?

[rohansahai]

"The finest pedalling is one in which the audience does not realise there is a pedal at all ! " - Josef Lhevinne in Basic principles in pianoforte playing

[rob47]

"My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun... they are the sun's kisses. "
Alexander Scriabin


yaaaaaaaaa......oh wait but he was probably insane by that point.

Scriabin's awesome.

[musicsdarkangel]

"The finest pedalling in one in which the audience does not realise there is a pedal at all ! " - Josef Lhevinne in Basic principles in pianoforte playing

There goes the most technically talented pianist that ever lived.

[musicsdarkangel]

"My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun... they are the sun's kisses. "
Alexander Scriabin


yaaaaaaaaa......oh wait but he was probably insane by that point.

Scriabin's awesome.

I actually stumbled across that one earlier on the net, it's awesome.

And yes, Scriabin is awesome.

Another Scriabin quote -

"I am God".

[raymagini]

Rachmaninoff, speaking to Horowitz after one of his performances

Rachmaninoff apparently said to him after a performance of the Tchaikovsky "your octaves are the loudest and fastest, but I must tell you, it was not musical. It was not neccessary." Horowitz joked and said he only did it so that he could please crowds, have success, and not have to go back to Russia.

[gkatele]

A review of Toscanini's concert back in the 1940's:

"Maestro Toscanini and his orchestra played all of the notes and none of the music."





George

[gkatele]

Patron of the Metropolitan Opera of New York:

"George Szell is his own worst enemy."

Rudolph Bing:

"Not while I'm alive, he isn't!"




George

[Steve T]

"Pardon?" ... Beethoven

"Er, what was your name again darling?" ... Liszt

"Yes dear, anything you say dear" ... Chopin

 

[rohansahai]

There goes the most technically talented pianist that ever lived.

Oh! Thanks, i'm flattered !!!  !!!!  . Keep practicing and soon you will describe yourself that way too !!!

[hodi]

"Though everything else may appear shallow and repulsive, even the smallest task in music is so absorbing, and carries us so far away from town, country, earth, and all worldly things, that it is truly a blessed gift of God."
                                                                                    -   Felix Mendelssohn

[musicsdarkangel]

Oh! Thanks, i'm flattered !!!  !!!!  . Keep practicing and soon you will describe yourself that way too !!!

LOL

[tooreclusive]

"Well, there's Hofmann... and then there's me."
    - Rachmaninoff, asked about the greatest pianist of the era.


"Dear Sir. I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. Your review is in front of me. Shortly, it will be behind me."

     - Max Reger, in response to a critic.

[pianonut]

well, here's a quote from a 'pianissimist' (quote from harold schoenberg) - vladimir de pachmann - who belonged to the 'no school' of piano playing.  he had no followers and made his own rules as he went along. 

he was playing one of his specialties, the chopin 'minute waltz' arranged in thirds.  "vy i do zis? i vill tell.  i see in ze owdience mein alte freund moriz rosenthal, and i do not vish him to copy my fingering."

[pianonut]

rachmaninov once said about studying music:  "you have to peer into every corner, take every screw apart, so that you can then easily put the whole together again."

 (please don't overanalyze this.  it's the only quote i could find quickly beside the one he said on his deathbed while looking at his hands:  "my dear hands.  farewell, my poor hands.")

[00range]

"The three most celebrated doctors on the island have been to see me. One sniffed at what I spat, the second tapped where I spat from, and the third sounded me and listened as I spat. The first said I was dead, the second that I was dying, and the third that I'm going to die." - Chopin

[Mozartian]

William Kapell:
"I think greatness in art is something you come upon after only yearning and pain, and a deep sense of being in a dark tunnel. Greatness in art is not something you tell yourself you have. It is the oasis, the greatness, the vision, or whatever you want to call it, after travelling the vast desert of lonely and parched feelings. After this, the oasis. And the older a musician gets who has once seen this oasis, the more he wants to live there all the time, so the more frequent are his attainments of greatness and vision."

"I, for one, am sick and tired of going along in any way with so-called public "taste." Many artists do not realize that by doing so they slowly are dying, creatively; and when artists die, so does art."

"Consider each challenge soberly, and then, step by step, meet it, in your own way. That's what I try to do. Sometimes my fingers work, sometimes not, - the hell with them! I want to sing anyway. And my heart seldom doesn't work. So don't brood over technique too much. Remember that you are a musician."

"The dull and stupid have a much easier time of it."

haha I love Kapell.

[pianonut]

i do too!  thanks for the quotes. i really related to the parched desert and then the oasis.  (used to live in the high desert, near mojave).  it does take a lot of persistence.  even when you get a low grade on something, someone doesn't like what you played, etc.  you have to keep going for yourself.   these quotes make me feel like singing since i am always happy with my own work in my own way...and aspire to greatness (not compared to others) of maintaining that joy in music that he speaks of.

i want to be the piano version of diane bish (she plays the organ).  she's got a lot of spunk and never let anyone get her down either.  now she coasting up and down the ohio river or wherever it is that old time riverboat she plays on goes, and occasionally going to europe to play in cathedrals.  and, her show is entitled 'the joy of music.'   

[whynot]

Rachmaninoff, about Rimski-Korsakov:
    "It seems strange that a man who handled the secrets of the orchestra in so masterful a fashion, down to the smallest details, should be so helpless as a conductor."

[Daevren]

Scriabin visited the homes of professors, as he had in the Conservatory days. Sergai Taneieff organised a "seminar against Wagner". His most brilliant students, post graduate and present, gathered together: Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Goldweizer, Igumnov, Catoire and Sabaneeff.
Wagnarism had become the fashion. But Taneieff and Tchaikovsky, the supreme authorities in Russia were dead in antipathy towards Wagner. To them, to imitate his music was a composer's worst sin.

Taneieff called Wagner 'trash', but said to his studends, as he distributed copies of Tristan, "We will study the villain thoroughly." Rachmaninoff, sitting in a corner with his legs curled under him and munching on a cabbage roll, cracked one of his rare jokes as he flipped trought the score, "Good! Only fifteen hundred pages left to go."

[stebroccm]

"I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare. "
--Vlademir Horowitz

"Laughter is the closest distance between two people."
--Victor Borge

"Sometimes when I sit own to practice and there is no one else in the room, I have to stifle an impulse to ring for the elevator man and offer him money to come in and hear me"
--Artur Rubinstein

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
--Richard Wagner

"Applaud friends, the comedy is over. (Said as he was dying)"
--Ludwig van Beethoven

[Rach3]

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
--Richard Wagner

I love this thread! Keep it going!

[rafant]

"Now all what I do have is a long nose and a 3rd (4rd) finger disobedient" - Chopin

[Gargamel]

These are all quotes pulled from "The Book of Poisonous Quotes" compiled by Colin M Jarman


"Composers shouldn't think too much, it interferes with their plagiarism"  --Howard Dietz

"Too many pieces finish too long after the end."  --Igor Stravinsky, 'New York Review of Books' (1971)

Proposed sign above a door of Symphony Hall in Boston-- "Exit in case of Brahms."  Philip Hale

On Gustav Mahler's 'Symphony No 2' -- "If that was music, I no longer understand anything about the subject." --Hans von Bulow

"It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year." --Tom Lehrer

"Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on the backside" --Ludwig van Beethoven

"After Rossini dies, who will there be to promote his music?" --Richard Wagner



ta ta.. Gargamel

[thalbergmad]

"You play Bach your way, I will play him his way" - Wanda Landowska

"Talentless bastard"- Tchaikovsky on Brahms. 

I read the last one in a book of quotes. Is it true? has anyone else heard it. It seems a bit harsh.

[ramseytheii]

"I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms.  What a giftless bastard! ... Brahms is chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff!" - Tchaikovsky

from the Lexicon of Musical Invective, compiled by Nicolas Slonimsky

Walter Ramsey

[thalbergmad]

Thanks for that Walter

[sznitzeln]

"Piano music is crap"
"Music is a disease"
"The two worst proffesions in the world are piano tuner and opera singer"
"What are you going to play now? ... Oh that stupid Chopin"
"You are raping the piano"

- My inspiring teacher (he is also a piano tuner and teaches opera singers)

[thalbergmad]

"Piano music is crap"
"Music is a disease"
"The two worst proffesions in the world are piano tuner and opera singer"
"What are you going to play now? ... Oh that stupid Chopin"
"You are raping the piano"

- My inspiring teacher (he is also a piano tuner and teaches opera singers)

"you have just murdered Mozart"

My teacher

[sznitzeln]

"I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare. "
--Vlademir Horowitz

Bulls**t

[freddychopin]

"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art." F. Chopin

[MaryBox]

Leon Fleisher quoted Artur Schnabel, referring to encores, in a concert this past winter after performng the Schubert B Minor Sonata: "I view the audiences applause as a receipt, not a bill."

[thracozaag]

"If the check is good, the acoustics are good."--The Rock

"I Vant to FOOOCK dem."--Horowitz on what he's thinking about in terms of the audience when he plays the Scriabin 5th sonata

"I paint!"
"So what!?"
 (Kapell's response to a zealous after-concert goer

"The cello of COURSE she plays the cello!  What else could she get between her legs.
??!"
--conductor after a concert (he was subsequently not re-booked)

"Mr. Rachmaninoff what inspired you to write such a sublime, amazing wonderful piece!?!"
"10 rubles"

"Maybe it'll save the piece"--The Rock on the 18th variation from the Paganini Variations

koji (STSD)

[The Six]

I didn't realize The Rock was so into classical music.

[Chrysalis]

The rock as in Wrestle mAnia??

[thracozaag]

I didn't realize The Rock was so into classical music.

  Perhaps if he would have had Vince McMahon as his manager, we would have had a steel cage death match with Josef Hoffman

koji (STSD)

[rafant]

I apologize for not remembering the author of this one:

"Amateurs practice a piece until they play well. Professionals practice until they can't play it badly."

[musik_man]

  Perhaps if he would have had Vince McMahon as his manager, we would have had a steel cage death match with Josef Hoffman

koji (STSD)

It would be so bad-ass if at one of Lang Lang's concerts, Yundi Li came out from backstage in the middle of a piece and floored LL with a folding chair to the head.

[keys]

"If I could gather up all the notes that I let fall under the piano, I could give a second concert with them." - Rubinstein

[chozart]

"If the check is good, the acoustics are good."--The Rock

"I Vant to FOOOCK dem."--Horowitz on what he's thinking about in terms of the audience when he plays the Scriabin 5th sonata

"I paint!"
"So what!?"
 (Kapell's response to a zealous after-concert goer

"The cello of COURSE she plays the cello! What else could she get between her legs.
??!"
--conductor after a concert (he was subsequently not re-booked)

"Mr. Rachmaninoff what inspired you to write such a sublime, amazing wonderful piece!?!"
"10 rubles"

"Maybe it'll save the piece"--The Rock on the 18th variation from the Paganini Variations

koji (STSD)

lol, those were quite good

we're not formally pianists or anything, but.. my friends & I:
After one had just performed the Rachmaninov Elegy Op.3/1, another says:
"Hey, that last note, hum it."
He responds "I'm sorry, what?"
* She walks to the piano and 'randomly' plays a e-flat minor chord * "Yeah, the b-flat! Wow, how'd I just know it??"
Me: "Uh, the piece is written in e-flat minor, lol"
  I dunno.. it cracked us up.. she flushed red after it, haha.

I don't think anyone has mentioned Mozart yet though (or I haven't seen..), so I must! Well, there it is, in my signature ^_^

[Barbosa-piano]

 I've found a lot of quotes by Rachmaninoff in the movie the Harvest of Sorrow. They are from his memoires.
"Time may change the technique of music, but it will not affect its fundamental mission."
"Only the art that is free has true meaning."
"My music is perhaps, a large coda into the night."
"America, what madness!"
"Farewell, Farewell my hands..."
"I had to compose 13 songs to have something to pay the priest with..." (on his marriage)
"...and the one thing they always wanted me to play, was that damned C# minor Prelude."
"...business drives everything along, business, and the worship of money..."

Rachmaninoff.

"The piano bard, the piano rhapsodist, the piano mind, the piano soul is Chopin."
                                                                                 Anton Rubinstein.

"We should not only respect music, it is necessary to love it. We only respect old or dead things. Beethoven's Sonatas are neither of those..."
Alfredo Casella.

This is an excerpt from Rachmaninoff's memoire on the time that he bought his car in France.

   A new Boticella, only costed me 600 Francs. Plus 100 Francs for the neighbor who drove me to the auction, plus, oh dear, oh dear, 200 Francs for the little dog we ran over on the way! Despite its great age, and talking about the motor of need, it works magnificently. And if I do change it, will only be if want to go faster...

This is a letter  written by Rachmaninoff to the New York Times, published on a page of thoughts on the Soviet Union.

                At no time, and in no country, has there ever existed a government responsible for so many cruelties wholesale murders, and common law crimes in general as these perpetrated by the Bolshevik. Is it really possible that with all his love for humanity, wisdom and philosophy, he could not find words of sympathy and pity for the Russian nation?
   By his evasive attitude toward the Communist grave-diggers of Russia, by the quasi-cordial atand, which he has taken toward them, he has lent strong and unjust support to a group of professional murderers.
   By concealing from the world the truth about Russia he has inflicted, perhaps unwittingly, great harm upon the whole population of Russia, and possibly the world at large.   

Well, those are some quotes by Rachmaninoff and others. If you want more, I can reply it here.
I hope I didn't go too far...
 
Sincerely,
Mario Barbosa.

[exigence]

Awesome thread.

Unfortunately, anything I would have had to contribute has been taken, but I did learn a lot.