“I have always loved music; whoso has skill in this art is of a good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music, or I would not regard him; neither should we ordain young men as preachers unless they have been well exercised in music.” Martin Luther (1483-1546)
“The man that hath no music in himself nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
“Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak….
Music alone with sudden charms can bind
The wand’ring one, and calm the troubled mind.” William Congreve (1670-1729)
“Music, the greatest good that mortals know. And all of heaven we have below.”
Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
“To keep young, every day read a poem, hear a choice piece of music, view a fine painting, and, if possible, do a good action. Man’s highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances, and as little as possible, to let himself be ruled by them.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
“I am inclined to think that a hunt for folk songs is better than a manhunt of the heroes who are so highly extolled.” Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
“I would walk ten leagues through the mud, the thing I hate most in the world, to hear a good performance of Don Giovanni. If anyone quotes an Italian phrase out of Don Giovanni immediately my tender memories of the music recur to me and take possession of me….As to the spiritual qualities of Mozart’s music, the tempest-wind of his impetuous genius will never lack the power to sweet away the dreaming, contemplative spirits of this world, nor fill their world with sad and haunting visions. Sometimes the impact of his music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched, as it were, in wave upon wave of melancholy.”
Henry Beyle Stendahl (1783-1842)
“Music stands quite alone. It is cut off from all the other arts….It does not express a particular and definite joy, sorrow, anguish, horror, delight, or mood of peace, but joy, sorrow, anguish, horror, delight, peace of mind themselves, in the abstract, in their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their customary motives. Yet it enables us to grasp and share them fully in this quintessence.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
“What is music?….This question occupied my mind for hours last night before I fell asleep. The very existence of music is wonderful, I might even say miraculous. Its domain is between thought and phenomena…It is spirit…subject to the measurement of time. It is matter…that can dispense with space….Where words leave off music begins.” Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
“At the end, a Mozart symphony which delighted me. My fatigue and the heat were excessive; but I had an experience there which never happened to me before; it was that the last piece seemed not only ravishing in every respect but that, apparently, it caused my fatigue to disappear while I was listening. That perfection, that completeness, those delicate shadings, all that must be the despair of musicians who have any soul and any taste.” Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)
“Music expressed that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
“When I hear a piece of music…I feel a delicious pleasure in which reason has no part. The habit of analysis comes afterward to give birth to admiration. The emotion increasing in proportion to the energy or the grandeur of the ideas of the composer soon produces a strange agitation in the circulation of the blood; tears, which generally indicate the end of the paroxysm, often indicate only a progressive state of it, leading to something still more intense. In this case I have spasmodic contraction of the muscles, a trembling in all my limbs, a complete torpor of the feet and hands, a partial paralysis of the nerves of sight and hearing…a semi-swoon.” Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
“Curran’s favorite mode of meditation was with his violin in his hand; for hours together he would forget himself, running voluntaries over the strings, while his imagination, collecting its tones, was opening all his faculties for the coming emergency at the bar.” Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
“Music is the universal language of mankind.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807- 1882)
“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
“I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven.” Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.” Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“The great geniuses suffer and must suffer, but they need not complain; they have known intoxication unknown to the rest of us and, if they have wept tears of sadness, they have poured tears of ineffable joy….Before describing the emotions that this incomparable masterpiece stirred in me, I ask myself if any pen can ever translate them…to give some idea of what went on inside me during those unparalleled hours, the charm of which has dominated my life like a luminous apparition, a revelatory vision.”
Charles Gounod (1818-1893)
“Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? To feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and biding together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation, all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy?” George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880)
“Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed…in music, and that is its power and significance.” Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
“To hear [Mozart’s] music is to feel one has accomplished some good deed. It is difficult to say precisely wherein this good influence lies, but undoubtedly it is beneficial; the longer I live and the better I know him, the more I love music….I grew up in a quiet spot and was saturated from earliest childhood with the wonderful beauty of Russian popular song. I am therefore passionately devoted to every expression of the Russian spirit….As to this national element in my work, its affinity with folk songs in some of my melodies and harmonies comes from my early years in the country.” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
“All the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people….I have myself gone to the simple tunes of the Bohemian peasants for hints in my most serious work.” Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
“After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant.” Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
“For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach….It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.” Pablo Casals (1876-1973)
“I know that twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.” Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
“Mozart makes you believe in God…because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and then passes after thirty-six years, leaving behind such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.” George Solti (1912-present)
“Music moves us across centuries and continents without ever leaving our chairs. Today I have stood in the huge quietness of Solemnes, circled the glittering ballrooms of Vienna, walked in Pepys’ Whitehall, careered about the room in the exuberance of a Victorian polka.” Pam Brown (1928-present)
“I go back to the G Minor Quintet for comfort, sometimes when I am most desperate. The kind of consolation it affords is parallel to what Wordsworth’s poetry gives me—helping me to bear myself in the despair of solitude.” Harold Bloom (1930?-present)
“As a director, my definition of paradise would be to be perpetually rehearsing Mozart’s operas.” Peter Hall (1930-present)
