15 quotes found
"It is improper, to expressly pursue the Urlinie in performance and to single out its tones...for the purpose of communicating the Urlinie to the listener." Rather, "for the performer, the Urlinie provides, first of all, a sense of direction. It serves a somewhat equivalent function to that which a road map serves for a mountain climber."
"Music was destined to reach its culmination in the likeness of itself."
"I certainly think Czerny’s large pianoforte [Op. 500] is worthy of study, particularly in regard to what he says aboutBeethoven and the performance of his works, for he was a diligent and attentive pupil…Czerny’s fingering is particularly worthy of attention. In fact I think that people today ought to have more respect for this excellent man."
"Czerny believed that finger development must be built solely on mechanical gymnastics. His method was one of endless repetition, of constant pecking at one spot…Czerny believed in first developing technique independently from music, then making this technique eventually serve the realisation of artistic aims. For the first time the full separation of mechanics and music was pronounced clearly and frankly."
"At the age of eleven, I had conceived an ardent desire to meet the great pedagogue Karl Czerny… My father had had lessons from the renowned teacher, so that I was well prepared to derive immediate benefit from his valuable instruction… It has been somewhat the fashion to underrate the services this really great man rendered to pianism; but we have only to point to the list of distinguished virtuosi who have come to him as to a fountain-head – Liszt, Thalberg, Döhler, Kullak … His studies are very valuable. He may well be called the Father of Virtuosi… His manner of teaching was somewhat that of an orchestral director. He gave his lessons standing, indicating the different shades of tempo and colouring by gestures. Czerny insisted principally on accuracy, brilliancy, and pianistic effects."
"No on understands better than he [Czerny] the way to strengthen the weakest fingers or by beneficial musical exercises to make study less burdensome without sacrifice of taste."
"Carl Czerny, “the dry and methodical genius” who has tortured generations of pianists with an inexhaustible stream of studies and exercises, established that it is possible to render on the piano one hundred dynamic gradations encompassed between limits which I shall term “not yet tone” and “no longer tone”."
"Carl Czerny, the nephew’s teacher, was much less devoted to these [Clementi’s] sonatas, and for this and other pedagogical reasons a disagreement arose between him and Beethoven, as a result of which lessons with him were discontinued. He was replaced by Joseph Czerny, a much better teacher than Carl… Under the new teacher’s guidance the nephew advanced along the road prescribed by his uncle."
"Czerny very frequently uses the words ‘humor, humorous, fantastic’ to describe the character of certain movements without even so much as hinting how such a character is to be presented. In one place he does say, “By the successful mastery of all mechanical difficulties.” But if that were all that was required, we would nowadays have hundreds of outstanding Beethoven pianists."
"It is, however, part of the unfortunate nature of the virtuoso [Czerny] that he demeans all these hard-won accomplishments and wishes to substitute technique for spirit."
"Not even with all one’s critical speed is it possible to catch up with Herr Czerny. Had I enemies, I would, in order to destroy them, force them to listen to nothing but music such as this. The insipidity of these variations is really phenomenal."
"The work at school was really not that difficult if one applied oneself to it, but it was so uninteresting that you could not wish to apply yourself. I felt there was another mathematics. I later found that the yearning for and the satisfaction gained from mathematical inslight brings the subject near to art. While talent is undoubtedly needed by itself, it does not always make a person a mathematician. Yet most people who go into mathematics do it because they are know they are good at it. When their talent slowly declines they find themselves occasionally quite lost. This happens to some people at an early age. But what are they to do then?"
"In spite of my admiration for , I myself left his seminar and even his private circle, to which I had been admitted. I was the youngest in age in the , but I was disappointed that these gatherings could not give me guidance for my work in number theory. Had I realized what Gödel would achieve later, I would not have run away. For Gödel's results show that logic is not a subject that stands alone and is a basis for mathematical thinking; it is in fact part of mathematics."
"Olga Taussky is remembered by many for her lectures. One was 's in 1981; this had a special resonance, for she had known Emmy Noether both at Göttingen and at Bryn Mawr. Others remember Olga as author of some beautiful research papers, as teacher, as collaborator, and someone whose zest for mathematics was deeply felt and contagious. The field she is most identified with—which might be called "linear algebra and applications," though "real and complex matrix theory" would be preferred by some—did not have autonomous existence in the 1930s, despite the textbook by . Her service in that field is the very highest, as was palpable in the standing ovation after her survey talk at the second Raleigh conference."
"It is clear that for Herbert Hunger, Byzantium was not an exotic phenomenon in the historical and political self-awareness of Austria in the twentieth century, but a legacy and consequently a claim whose pointed cultivation should certainly benefit the country's image. This – one might say – national goal, which we today would rather describe as a European goal, has, as we all know, been realized."