Organists

"Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his."

"Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny."

"Wasting time is one of the worst faults of the world. Life is so short, every moment is so precious and yet, we live as if life will never end."

"When you write the story of two happy lovers, place them on the shores of Lake Como. I do not know a district more manifestly blessed by heaven; I've never seen another where the charms of a life of love would seem more natural [...] and start it with these words: "On the shores of Lake Como.""

"I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound."

"His playing was free, poetic, replete with imaginative shadings, and, at the same time, characterized by noble, artistic repose. And his technique, his virtuosity? I hesitate to speak if it. It suffices to observe that he has not lost it but has rather added to it in clarity and moderation. What a remarkable man! After a life incomparably rich and active, full of excitement, passion, and pleasure, he returns at the age of sixty-two and plays the most difficult music with the ease and strength and freshness of a youth…."

"Perhaps the greatest source of wonder in Liszt's life was that he composed anything at all, let alone anything of lasting greatness. The man who, from an early age, had crisscrossed Europe as the greatest travelling virtuoso, providing, with the onset of puberty, much material for gossip columns, might have been forgiven for taking the Wildean view, 'My art is my life', and leaving it at that. [...] Exactly how Liszt could have found the time to compose is difficult to imagine."

"Composer, teacher, Abbé, Casanova, writer, sage, pioneer and champion of new music, philanthropist, philosopher and one of the greatest pianists in history, Franz Liszt was the very embodiment of the Romantic spirit. He worked in every field of music except ballet and opera and to each field he contributed a significant development."

"I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States."

"In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or any purpose. There is nothing in the whole age of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source."

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression – at least, not in the beginning – and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap."

"The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds. Thousands pass it, while others trample it under foot, and thus the chances are that it will perish before it is seen by the one discriminating spirit who will prize it above all else. The fact that no one has as yet arisen to make the most of it does not prove that nothing is there."

"The Americans expect great things of me... If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense."

"He certainly over-heated himself at Venice by walking at a season when it is said that only Dogs and Englishmen are seen out of doors at noon, all else lie down in the middle of the day."

"Now, as discord is allowable, and even necessarily opposed to concord, why may not noise, or a seeming jargon, be opposed to fixed sounds and harmonical proportion? Some of the discords in modern music, unknown till this century, are what the ear can but just bear, but have a very good effect as to contrast. The severe laws of preparing and resolving discord, may be too much adhered to for great effect; I am convinced that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it."

"With respect to excellence of Style and Composition, it may perhaps be said that to practised ears the most pleasing Music is such as has the merit of novelty, added to refinement, and ingenious contrivance; and to the ignorant, such as is most familiar and common."

"The umbrage given to Cuzzoni by her [ Faustina Bordoni's] coming hither, proves that as Turkish monarchs can bear no brother near the throne, an aspiring sister is equally obnoxious to a theatrical Queen."

"A prophet such as we could use again today, strong, zealous, angry and gloomy in opposition to the leaders, the masses, indeed the whole world. (Letter to his pastor Julius Schubring, 1846, regarding Mendelssohn's choral work 'Elijah' published that year)"

"Ich überhaupt vielseitigkeit nicht recht mag, oder eigentlich nicht recht daran glaube. Was eigenthümlich, und schön, und groß sein soll, das muß einseitig sein."

"Und sind Sie mit mir einer Meinung, daß es die erste Bedingung zu einem Künstler sei, daß er Respekt vor dem Großen habe, und sich davor beuge, und es anerkenne, und nicht die großen Flammen auszupusten versuche, damit das kleine Talglicht ein wenig heller leuchte?"

"Die Leute beklagen sich gewöhnlich, die Musik sei so vieldeutig; es sei so zweifelhaft, was sie sich dabei zu denken hätten, und die Worte verstände doch ein Jeder. Mir geht es aber gerade umgekehrt. Und nicht blos mit ganzen Reden, auch mit einzelnen Worten, auch die scheinen mir so vieldeutig, so unbestimmt, so mißverständlich im Vergleich zu einer rechten Musik, die einem die Seele erfüllt mit tausend besseren Dingen als Worten. Das, was mir eine Musik ausspricht, die ich liebe, sind mir nicht zu unbestimmte Gedanken, um sie in Worte zu fassen, sondern zu bestimmte."

"Dem höchsten Gott allein zu Ehren, Dem Nächsten draus sich zu belehren."

"Und soll wie aller Musik also auch des Generalbasses Finis und Endursache anders nicht als nur zu Gottes Ehre und Recreation des Gemütes sein. Wo dieses nicht in acht genommen wird, ists keine eigentliche Musik, sondern ein Teuflisches Geplerr und Geleier."

"Not brook, but ocean should be his name (Bach is the German word for brook.)"

"Bach is the immortal God of Harmony."

"To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation."

"To be able to hear J. S. Bach take a melody and improvise what amounts to a spontaneous composition is the most amazing thing I can think of."

"My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand mathematics and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common."

"One of the most extraordinary things about history's most extraordinary musician is the fact that this man's music, which exerts such a magnetic attraction for us today, against which we tend to measure much of the achievement in the art of music in the last two centuries, that this music had absolutely no effect on either the musicians or the public of his own day. And the strange thing about Bach is that he doesn't at all fit our conception of the misunderstood genius who was years ahead of his time. He was certainly misunderstood, but not because he was ahead of his time, rather because according the musical disposition of that day, he was generations behind it."

"For Bach, it wasn't finality that mattered in music, it was simply the joyous essence of being."

"The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile."

"I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that – its humanity."

"Bach is, for me, the touchstone that keeps my playing honest. Keeping the intonation pure in double stops, bringing out the various voices where the phrasing requires it, crossing the strings so that there are not inadvertent accents, presenting the structure in such a way that it's clear to the listener without being pedantic - one can't fake things in Bach, and if one gets all of them to work, the music sings in the most wonderful way."

"Pongileoni's bowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking onto it vibrating: and thus in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward's membrane tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus, and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edwards ecstatically whispered "Bach!""

"I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course."

"All roads lead to Bach."

"Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all."

"JS Bach has been called 'the supreme arbiter and law-giver of music'. He is to music what Leonardo da Vinci is to art and Shakespeare is to literature, one of the supreme creative geniuses of history."

"I compared it to H Geminorum and the small star in the quartile between Auriga and Gemini, and finding it so much larger than either of them, suspected it to be a comet."

"Hier ist wahrhaftig ein Loch im Himmel !"

"A knowledge of the construction of the heavens has always been the ultimate object of my observations..."

"I must freely confess that by continuing my sweeps of the heavens my opinion of the arrangement of the stars and their magnitudes, and of some other particulars, has undergone a gradual change..."

"An equal scattering of the stars may be admitted in certain calculations; but when we examine the milky way, or the closely compressed clusters of stars... this supposed equality of scattering must be given up."

"'We may... have surmised nebulae to be no other than clusters of stars disguised by their very great distance, but a longer experience and better acquaintance with the nature of nebulae, will not allow a general admission of such a principle, although undoubtedly a cluster of stars may assume a nebulous appearance when it is too remote for us to discern the stars of which it is composed."

"An object may not only contain stars, but also nebulosity not composed of them."

"It will be necessary to explain the spirit of the method of arranging the observed astronomical objects under consideration in such a manner, that one shall assist us to understand the nature and construction of the other. This end I propose to obtain by assorting them into as many classes as will be required to produce the most gradual affinity... and it will be found that those contained in one article, are so closely allied to those in the next, that there is perhaps not so much difference between them... as there would be in an annual description of the human figure were it given from the birth of a child till he comes to be a man in his prime."

"A nebulous matter, diffused in such exuberance throughout the regions of space, must surely draw our attention to the purpose for which it probably may exist; and it must be the business of a critical inquirer to attend to all the appearances under which it will be exposed to his view..."

"A proportional condensation of the nebulous matter in the brighter places will sufficiently account for their different degree of shining."

"Instead of inquiring after the nature of the cause of the condensation of nebulous matter, it would indeed be sufficient for the present purpose to call it merely a condensing principle; but since we are already acquainted with the centripetal force of attraction which gives a globular figure to planets, keeps them from flying out of their orbits in tangents, and makes one star revolve around another, why should we not look up to the universal gravitation of matter as the cause of every condensation, accumulation, compression, and concentration of the nebulous matter?"

"The number of compound nebulæ... being so considerable, it will follow, that if they owe their origin to the breaking up of some former extensive nebulosities of the same nature with those which have been shewn to exist at present, we might expect that the number of separate nebulæ should far exceed the former, and that moreover these scattered nebulas should be found not only in great abundance, but also in proximity or continuity with each other... Now this is exactly what by observation, we find to be the state of the heavens."

"We may conceive that, perhaps in progress of time these nebulæ which are already in such a state of compression, may be still farther condensed so as actually to become stars."

"We can hardly suppose a possibility of the production of a globular form without a consequent revolution of the nebulous matter, which in the end may settle in a regular rotation about some fixed axis."

"I compared also the present appearance of this nebula with the delineation which Huyghens has given of it in his Systema Saturnium... The changes that are thus proved to have already happened, prepare us for those that may be expected hereafter to take place, by the gradual condensation of the nebulous matter; for had we no where an instance of any alteration in the appearance of nebula, they might be looked upon as permanent celestial bodies, and the successive changes, to which by the action of an attracting principle they have been conceived to be subject, might be rejected as being unsupported by observation."

"The starlike appearance of the following six nebulæ is so considerable that the best description... was to compare them to stars with certain deficiencies."

"I have made it a rule never to employ a larger telescope when a smaller will answer the purpose."

"When I resided at Bath I had long been acquainted with the theory of optics and mechanics, and wanted only that experience so necessary in the practical part of these sciences. This I acquired by degrees at that place where in my leisure hours, by way of amusement, I made several two-foot, five-foot, seven-foot, ten-foot and twenty-foot Newtonian telescopes, beside others, of the Gregorian form, of eight, twelve, and eighteen inches, and two, three, five, and ten feet focal length. In this way I made not less than two hundred seven-foot, one hundred and fifty ten-foot, and about eighty twenty-foot mirrors, not to mention the Gregorian telescopes.*"

"The number of stands I invented for these telescopes it would not be easy to assign. ...In 1781 I began to construct a thirty foot aërial reflector, and having made a stand for it, I cast the mirror thirty-six inches in diameter. This was cracked in cooling. I cast it a second time, and the furnace I had built in my house broke."

"In the year 1783 I finished a very good twenty-foot reflector with a large aperture, and mounted it upon the plan of my present telescope. After two years' observation with it, the great advantage of such apertures appeared so clearly to me that I recurred to my former intention of increasing them still further; and being now sufficiently provided with experience in the work which I wished to undertake, the President of the Royal Society, who is always ready to promote useful undertakings, had the goodness to lay my design before the king. His Majesty was graciously pleased to approve of it, and with his usual liberality to support it with his royal bounty."

"In consequence of this arrangement I began to construct the forty-foot telescope about the latter end of 1785. The woodwork of the stand and machines for giving the required motions to the instrument were immediately put in hand. In the whole of the apparatus none but common workmen were employed, for I made drawings of every part of it, by which it was easy to execute the work, as I constantly inspected and directed every person's labor; though sometimes there were not less than forty different workmen employed at the same time. While the stand of the telescope was preparing, I also began the construction of the great mirror, of which I inspected the casting, grinding, and polishing, and the work was in this manner carried on with no other interruption than that occasioned by the removal of all the apparatus and materials from where I then lived, to my present situation at Slough."

"Here [in Slough], soon after my arrival, I began to lay the foundation upon which by degrees the whole structure was raised as it now stands, and the speculum being highly polished and put into the tube, I had the first view through it on February 19, 1787. ...the first speculum, by a mismanagement of the person who cast it, came out thinner on the centre of the back than was intended, and on account of its weakness would not permit a good figure to be given to it. ...A second mirror was cast January 26, 1788, but it cracked in cooling. February 16 we recast it, and it proved to be of a proper degree of strength. October 24 it was brought to a pretty good figure and polish, and I observed the planet Saturn with it. But not being satisfied, I continued to work upon it till August 27, 1789, when it was tried upon the fixed stars, and I found it to give a pretty sharp image. Large stars were a little affected with scattered light, owing to many remaining scratches on the mirror. August the 28th, 1789, having brought the telescope to the parallel of Saturn, I discovered a sixth satellite of that planet, and also saw the spots upon Saturn better than I had ever seen them before, so that I may date the finishing of the forty-foot telescope from that time."

"I should not wonder if, considering all this, we were induced to think that nothing remained to be added; and yet we are still very ignorant in regard to the internal construction of the sun. ...The spots have been supposed to be solid bodies, the smoke of volcanoes, the scum floating on an ocean of fluid matter, clouds, opaque masses, and to be many other things. ...The sun itself has been called a globe of fire, though, perhaps, metaphorically. ...It is time now to profit by the observations we are in possession of. I have availed myself of the labors of preceding astronomers, but have been induced thereto by my own actual observation of the solar phenomena."

"According to my theory, a dark spot in the sun is a place in its atmosphere which happens to be free from luminous decompositions [above it]."

"That the emission of light must waste the sun, is not a difficulty that can be opposed to our hypothesis. Many of the operations of Nature are carried on in her great laboratory which we cannot comprehend. Perhaps the many telescopic comets may restore to the sun what is lost by the emission of light."

"These binary stars] may serve another very important end. ...Several stars of the first magnitude have been observed or suspected to have a proper motion; hence we may surmise that our sun, with all its planets and comets, may also have a motion towards some particular point of the heavens. ...If this surmise should have any foundation, it will show itself in a series of some years in a kind of systematical parallax, or change due to the motion of the whole solar system."

"In future... we shall look upon those regions into which we may now penetrate by means of such large telescopes, as a naturalist regards a rich extent of ground or chain of mountains containing strata variously inclined and directed, as well as consisting of very different materials. The surface of a globe or map therefore will but ill delineate the interior parts of the heavens."

"It is very probable that the great stratum called the Milky Way is that in which the sun is placed, though perhaps not in the very centre of its thickness. ...We gather this from the appearance of the Galaxy, which seems to encompass the whole heavens, as it certainly must do if the sun is within it."

"It is evident that we cannot mean to affirm that the stars of the fifth, sixth, and seventh magnitudes are really smaller than those of the first, second, or third, and that we must ascribe the cause of the difference in the apparent magnitudes of the stars to a difference in their relative distances from us. On account of the great number of stars in each class, we must also allow that the stars of each succeeding magnitude, beginning with the first, are, one with another, further from us than those of the magnitude immediately preceding."

"A standard of reference for the arrangement of the stars may be had by comparing their distribution to a certain properly modified equality of scattering. The equality which I propose does not require that the stars should be at equal distances from each other, nor is it necessary that all those of the same nominal magnitude should be equally distant from us."

"In this case, radiant heat will at least partly, if not chiefly, consist, if I may be permitted the expression, of invisible light; that is to say, of rays coming from the sun, that have such a momentum as to be unfit for vision. And admitting, as is highly probable, that the organs of sight are only adapted to receive impressions from particles of a certain momentum, it explains why the maximum of illumination should be in the middle of the refrangible rays; as those which have greater or less momenta are likely to become equally unfit for the impression of sight."

"To conclude, if we call light, those rays which illuminate objects, and radiant heat, those which heat bodies, it may be inquired whether light be essentially different from radiant heat? In answer to which I would suggest that we are not allowed, by the rules of philosophizing, to admit two different causes to explain certain effects, if they may be accounted for by one. ...If this be a true account of the solar heat, for the support of which I appeal to my experiments, it remains only for us to admit that such of the rays of the sun as have the refrangibility of those which are contained in the prismatic spectrum, by the construction of the organs of sight, are admitted under the appearance of light and colors, and that the rest, being stopped in the coats and humors of the eye, act on them, as they are known to do on all the other parts of our body, by occasioning a sensation of heat."

"This consideration must alter the form of our proposed inquiry; for the question being thus at least partly decided, since it is ascertained that we have rays of heat which give no light, it can only become a subject of inquiry whether some of these heat-making rays may not have a power of rendering objects visible, superadded to their now already established power of heating bodies. This being the case, it is evident that the onus probandi [burden of proof] ought to lie with those who are willing to establish such an hypothesis, for it does not appear that Nature is in the habit of using one and the same mechanism with any two of our senses. Witness the vibration of air that makes sound, the effluvia that occasion smells, the particles that produce taste, the resistance or repulsive powers that affect the touch—all these are evidently suited to their respective organs of sense."

"Nebulæ can be selected so that an insensible gradation shall take place from a coarse cluster like the Pleiades down to a milky nebulosity like that in Orion, every intermediate step being represented. This tends to confirm the hypothesis that all are composed of stars more or less remote."

"The naked eye has its limit of vision in the stars of the sixth magnitude. The light of fainter stars than these does not affect the retina enough for them to be seen. A very small telescope penetrates to smaller, and, in general, without doubt, to more distant stars. A more powerful one penetrates deeper into space, and as its power is increased, so the boundaries of the visible universe are widened, and the number of stars increased to millions and millions. Whoever has followed the history of the series of Herschel's telescopes will have observed this. But Herschel was not content with the bare fact, but strove ever to know how far a telescope of a certain construction and size could penetrate, compared with the naked and unassisted eye. These investigations were never for the discovery of new facts concerning the working of his instruments; it was for the knowledge of the distribution of the fixed stars in space itself that he strove. Herschel's instruments were designed to aid vision to the last extent. They were only secondarily for the taking of measures. His efforts were not for a knowledge of the motions, but of the constitution and construction of the heavenly bodies."

"Like Bradley, Herschel made an unexpected discovery in searching for parallax. He selected for observation stars close to each other in the sky, following the guidance of Galileo. Although Herschel failed to find parallax, he did find that in some cases the stars he observed appeared to be in relative motion around their common center of gravity. They were clearly "binary stars," bound by gravity to orbit one another. It is now realized that almost half of all stars can be found in binary systems."

"Being self-taught, he had not known that astronomers were expected to focus on the solar system. Instead, he explored the construction of the universe, and it was on later generations that the questions he asked and the methods he devised to answer them were to have profound influence."

"William as a natural historian of the heavens, a collector of astronomical specimens, was like a modern supertanker; once under way, it was almost impossible for him to stop. In 1802, when the campaign with the 20ft finally came to an end, the hundred or so nebulae of Messier had been augmented by no fewer than two-and-a-half thousand."

"William's catalogues [of nebulae] are... of the greatest significance in the story of the astronomy of the large-scale universe."

"In 1800 he had published his momentous discovery of infra-red rays; and in 1803 and 1804 his re-examination of double stars would reveal examples where the two components had orbited each other, visual proof that attractive forces...operated outside the solar system. ...between 1811 and 1818 he published four great synthetic papers on the construction of the heavens, in which he expounded the life-story of nebulae and clusters as they developed over time under the influence of gravity. ...Soon, development over time—in contrast to the unchanging clockwork universe of Newton and Leibniz—would become and remain part of astronomical thinking."

"It's no exaggeration to say that modern astronomy was invented, more or less single-handedly, by William Herschel in the last decades of the eighteenth century."

"William's chief reference... was A Complete System of Opticks, a two-volume work published in 1738 by Robert Smith, the same author whose [mathematics] book on harmonics [Harmonics, or The Philosophy of Musical Sounds] had captivated him more than a decade earlier. Smith explained the theory of optics but also gave step-by-step instructions on how to apply it to the construction and use of astronomical telescopes. ...word reached him that a Quaker gentleman who lived nearby was giving up his hobby, which just happened to be grinding telescope mirrors. William bought up his tools and some partially finished mirrors. The man gave him some lessons and then, armed with Smith's instructions, he went to work."

"William Herschel was the first man to give a reasonably correct picture of the shape of our star-system or galaxy; he was the best telescope-maker of his time, and possibly the greatest observer who ever lived."

""Planetarium" was written after a visit to a real planetarium, where I read an account of the work of Caroline Herschel, the astronomer, who worked with her brother William, but whose name remained obscure, as his did not."

"In consequence of the harassing and fatiguing life he had led during the winter months, he used to retire to bed with a bason of milk or glass of water, and Smith's 'Harmonics and Optics,' Ferguson's 'Astronomy,' &c., and so went to sleep buried under his favourite authors; and his first thoughts on rising were how to obtain instruments for viewing those objects himself of which he had been reading."

"It soon appeared that my brother was not contented with knowing what former observers had seen, for he began to contrive a telescope eighteen or twenty feet long (I believe after Huyghens description)..."

"I was much hindered in my musical practice by my help being continually wanted in the execution of the various contrivances, and I had to amuse myself with making the tube of pasteboard for the glasses which were to arrive from London, for at that time no optician had settled at Bath. But when all was finished, no one besides my brother could get a glimpse of Jupiter or Saturn, for the great length of the tube would not allow it to be kept in a straight line. This difficulty, however, was soon removed by substituting tin tubes."

"My brother wrote to inquire the price of a reflecting mirror for (I believe) a five or six foot telescope. The answer was, there were none of so large a size, but a person offered to make one at a price much above what my brother thought proper to give... About this time he bought of a Quaker resident at Bath, who had formerly made attempts at polishing mirrors, all his rubbish of patterns, tools, hones, polishers, unfinished mirrors, &c., but all for small Gregorians, and none above two or three inches diameter."

"To my sorrow I saw almost every room turned into a workshop. A cabinetmaker making a tube and stands of all descriptions in a handsomely furnished drawing-room. Alex [a brother] putting up a huge turning machine (which he had brought in the autumn from Bristol where he used to spend the summer) in a bedroom, for turning patterns, grinding glasses, and turning eye-pieces &c. At the same time music durst not lie entirely dormant during the summer, and my brother had frequent rehearsals at home..."

"According to Herschel, the sun consisted of three essentially different parts. First, there was a solid nucleus, non-luminous, cool, and even capable of being inhabited. Second, above this was an atmosphere proper; and, lastly, outside of this was a layer in which floated the clouds, or bodies which gave to the solar surface its intense brilliancy."

"In 1783 he published his paper On the Proper Motion of the Solar System which contained the proofs of his surmises of a year before. ...His second paper on the Direction and Velocity of the solar system (1805) is the best example that can possibly be given of his marvellous skill in reaching the heart of a matter, and it may be the one in which his philosophical powers appear in their highest exercise. For sustained reflection and high philosophic thought it is to be ranked with the researches of Newton in the Principia."

"Herschel's method of study was founded on a mode of observation which he called star-gauging. It consisted in pointing a powerful telescope toward various parts of the heavens, and ascertaining by actual count how thick the stars were in each region. His twenty-foot reflector was provided with such an eye-piece that, in looking into it, he saw a portion of the heavens about 15' in diameter. A circle of this size on the celestial sphere has about one quarter the apparent surface of the sun, or of the full moon. On pointing the telescope in any direction, a greater or less number of stars were visible. These were counted, and the direction in which the telescope pointed was noted. Gauges of this kind were made in all parts of the sky, and the results were tabulated in the order of right ascension."

"Herschel's argument was... Since with such a telescope one can see a star ten times as far off as is possible to the naked eye, this telescope has the power of penetrating into space ten times farther than the eye alone. But this number ten, also, expresses the ratio of the diameter of the objective to that of the pupil of the eye, consequently the general law is that the space-penetrating power of a telescope is found by dividing the diameter of the mirror in inches by two-fifths. The diameter of the pupil of the eye (two fifths of an inch) Herschel determined by many measures."

"Having tried many varieties of shade-glasses between the eye-piece of his telescope and the eye, in order to reduce the inordinate degree of heat and light transmitted by the instrument when directed towards the sun, he observed that certain combinations of colored glasses permitted very little light to pass, but transmitted so much heat that they could not be used; while, on the other hand, different combinations and differently colored glasses would stop nearly all the heat, but allow an inconveniently great amount of light to pass. At the same time he noticed, in the various experiments, that the images of the sun were of different colors. This suggested the question as to whether there was not a different heating power proper to each color of the spectrum. On comparing the readings of sensitive thermometers exposed in different portions of an intense solar spectrum, he found that, beginning with the violet end, he came to the maximum of light long before that of heat, which lay at the other extremity, that is, near the red. By several experiments it appeared that the maximum of illumination, i.e., the yellow, had little more than half the heat of the full red rays; and from other experiments he concluded that even the full red fell short of the maximum of heat, which, perhaps, lay even a little beyond the limits of the visible spectrum."

"A third and last paper in this department of physics [the infrared and light spectrum]... was published in volume ninety of the Philosophical Transactions and gave the results of two hundred and nineteen quantitative experiments. ...Herschel made a careful determination of the quantitative distribution of light and of heat in the prismatic spectrum, and discovered the surprising fact that not only where the light was at a maximum the heat was very inconsiderable, but that where there was a maximum exhibition of heat, there was not a trace of light. ...Herschel ...finally concluded that light and radiant heat were of essentially different natures... for a long time the question was looked upon as closed, and not until thirty-five years later was there any dissent. Then the Italian physicist, Melloni, with instrumental means a thousand times more delicate than that of Herschel, and with a far larger store of cognate phenomena, collected during the generation which had elapsed... discovered the true law."

"Groups which remain nebulous in a seven-foot telescope, become stellar in a ten-foot. The nebulosity of the ten-foot can be resolved into stars by the twenty-foot, and so on. The nebulæ which remained still unresolved, it was reasonable to conclude, would yield to higher power, and generally a nebula was but a group of stars removed to a great distance. An increase of telescopic power was alone necessary to demonstrate this. So, at first, Herschel believed that his twenty-foot telescope was of power sufficient to fathom the Milky Way, that is, to see through it and beyond it, and to reduce all its nebulosities to true groups of stars. In 1791 he published a memoir on Nebulous Stars, in which his views were completely changed. He had found a nebulous star... to which his reasons would not apply. In the centre of it was a bright star; around the star was a halo gradually diminishing in brightness from the star outward, and perfectly circular. It was clear the two parts, star and nebula, were connected and thus at the same distance from us. ...The hypothesis of an elastic shining fluid existing in space, sometimes in connection with stars, sometimes distinct from them, was adopted and never abandoned. ...in late years we have seen the reverse of the process imagined by Herschel. A star has actually, under our eyes, become a planetary nebula, and the cycle of which he gave the first terms is complete."

"More often than not, one meets technicians, nimble keyboardists by profession, who … indeed astound us with their prowess without ever touching our sensibilities .... stirring performance depends upon an alert mind which is willing to follow reasonable precepts in order to reveal the content of the compositions. What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition. Any passage can be so radically changed by modifying its performance that it will be scarcely recognizable."

"A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved. He must feel all the emotions that he hopes to arouse in his audience, for the revealing of his own humor will stimulate a like mood in the listener."

"According to my principles, every master has his true and certain value. Praise and criticism cannot change any of that. Only the work itself praises and criticizes the master, and therefore I leave to everyone his own value."

"They want me to write differently. Certainly I could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?"

"Anton Bruckner’s reputation rests almost entirely with his symphonies – the symphonies, someone said, that Wagner never wrote."

"We recoil in horror before this rotting odour which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint. His imagination is so incurably sick and warped that anything like regularity in chord progressions and period structure simply do not exist for him. Bruckner composes like a drunkard!"

"Half genius, half simpleton."

"This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. In listening to these works...one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ bench."

"Nothing is more difficult than talking about music: if it is a prickly business for musicians, it is almost impossible for anyone else—the strongest, subtlest minds go astray."

"Music is motion from nonrest to rest."

"I find him interesting, especially when played by Yvonne Loriod. The works of his I've heard often start magnificantly, but their initial promise is never realized, and you get these sugar-water climaxes that I can't stand. Splendid ideas, then suddenly Gershwin, cloying sweetness! Having said that, I like Gershwin a lot. He's excellent in his own field, and less sentimental than Messiaen."

"It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its over-inclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist’s nature? As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different."

"Now, there are some periods of music, some pitches of which I can hear nothing... of my music as well as of others. I feel that there is on my shoulders nothing more than a terrible cloak of misery and discouragement."

"It was not just in the Andante of the Second Quartet that I remembered having translated (almost involuntarily) the distant memory of bells which in the evening at Montgauzy — and this is some time ago — came to us from a village called Cadillac when the wind blew from the west. From this dull sound a vague dreaminess arose, which, like all vague dreams, is literally untranslatable. Only, does it not happen often that some exterior fact numbs us so that our thoughts become so imprecise that in reality they are not thoughts, and yet are nevertheless something in which we can take pleasure? The desire for things which do not exist perhaps, and this is indeed where music holds sway."

"Gabriel Fauré, repeating a thought he had often expressed to me, wrote in a letter on the 2nd August 1910: "In piano music one cannot use padding; one must pay in cash so that it is interesting all the time. It is perhaps the most difficult genre if you want to be as satisfying as possible," and he added modestly, "and I do my best." Then, as if in reply to some unjust reproach, "Only it cannot be done any faster.""

"But Lortat, I'm not in the habit of attracting crowds."

"As to the piece I have started, it will only be the fiftieth or more of my piano pieces that, with rare exceptions, pianists allow to pile up without playing, That has been their lot for twenty years.""

"As for my work, I can say that it reaches its end. [...] I do not want my Quartet to be published and played before it has been tried out in front of my friends, who have always been the first to hear my works: Dukas, Poujaud, Lalo, de Lallemand. I trust their judgment and it is to them that I leave the decision of whether this Quartet should be published or destroyed."

"When I am no more, you will hear said of my work: "After all, it is only so much..." You will detach yourself from it, perhaps ... All that has no importance. I have done what I could ... and so, judge, my God."

"To know an art really well, one must know everything about it, both its origins and its development."

"How many times have I asked myself what use music is? And what am I translating? What feelings? What ideas? How can I express something I do not understand myself?"

"He denied the presence of inspiration: "Without work, which is art, there is nothing," he said. "Say only that which is of value, or stay silent" was the credo of his entire existence."

"And I always enjoy seeing sunlight play on the rocks, the water, the trees and plains. What variety of effects, what brilliance and what softness... I wish my music could show as much diversity."

"Imagining is trying to formulate all one would wish to be better, all that surpasses reality."

"For me art and music especially consists of raising ourselves as high as possible above that which is."

"Music by Fauré is not very familiar to American audiences. He is best known here by his songs and by the incidental music which he wrote for Maeterlinck's "Pelléas et Mélisande"—music, by the way, which is far from showing him at his best. This quintet is in another case. [...] Fauré is reckoned, somewhat mistakenly, among those younger French music-makers who are conveniently summed up as "advanced." Actually, he is in his music infinitely less radical, less adventurous, in his methods of musical expression than are those younger men with whom he has been indiscriminately grouped. Yet in this new quintet there is much that is genuinely, and in the best sense, "modern" In its method of utterance: there are harmonic effects that are delicious in their subtlety and their iridescent hue; there are melodic ideas which captivate the imagination by their freedom and their delicacy of contour. More noteworthy, however, than the surface quality of this music that is unfailingly serene and noble, and that has moments of deep and exquisite beauty. In the second movement, particularly, there are pages where one is reminded that there is such a thing as "inspiration" even—shall one extravagantly say?—in contemporary music."

"Here is another composer of whom France has a right to be proud. Gabriel Fauré (1845), of whom it has been said that he is the French Schumann. His talent is above all manifested in what might be called intimate music, symphonic in spirit, in his songs. It is entirely unlike stage music, and a frame seems to envelop one who experiences from the music the charm of a journey taken in a dream. He chose his special direction from instinct. Listen to his disturbed songs, the first movement, so vehement, of his sonata for piano and violin, the Andante of the first quartet, for piano and strings, which has a most poignant melancholy; the vigorous first movement and the poetic Andante of the tenth [sic] quartet, many parts of his Symphony in D, certain pages of his music for the dramas of "Caligula" of Alexander Dumas, pere, and of the "Merchant of Venice" of Shakespeare; the beautiful Elegy for piano and 'cello, the gracious and feline Berceuse for piano and violin, and, above all, the admirable Requiem, which might be admired even in connection with that of Johannes Brahms, and you will arrive at the conclusion that Gabriel Fauré merits special mention among the French musicians who have cultivated mainly symphony, and that his note is absolutely personal."

"Fauré sets to French musicians a matchless example of sincerity and genuineness. Neither following fashion nor listening to would-be advisers, he proceeded untrammelled in his quest for beauty. He remained simple, combining impassioned imagination and lucidity of mind. When one listens to his music one always feels secure that an apex is reached, that here is perfection. In the beautiful proportions of his music, a great lesson is embodied—a lesson that has never been more needful than now, when the younger French school is so deeply thrilled by the innovations of Schönberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók. The main features of French art at its best are continuity and perspicuity."

"The harmony called modern, considered as a means of technique, does not suffice to constitute a modern music. Such compositions, where are to be found gathered together all the new devices, often give only a negative impression. On the other hand, some works based on harmonies relatively simple can invoke an intensely modern atmosphere. There are to be found many examples in the music of M. Gabriel Fauré, who, by the peculiar and charming turn he gives to some harmonic combinations, which are relatively little complicated, is one of the most modern composers of our epoch. The precursor of the movement of today, with which he still remains associated by his productions, his position in the history of French music will be important. [...] It is thus, as we have said in the preface, that M. Gabriel fauré occupies an exceptional place by the turn, full of elegance and of modernism, which he knows how to give to successions of relatively simple chords."

"In spite of the torment caused by his hearing, his head was full of music and his inspiration seemed unaffected by his worries. He was the creator of a world of sound whose elements he drew from within his own being, and his work, affected by the inroads of age, became more spiritual. His greatest regret was that he did not have enough time to compose, he met with obstacle after obstacle, his every composition was the product of lengthy deliberation, which required an immense effort from him ("It is like a sticking door that I have to open," he told us), and yet this was the man who left us a body of work whose importance and quality make it one of the summits of human thought."

"When in 1882, Fauré met Lizst again in Zürich, he submitted to him the manuscript of the Ballade which he had just written. "I was rather afraid that it might be too long, " Fauré told me, "and I said this to Liszt, who gave me the marvelous reply: 'Too long, young man, has no meaning. One writes as one thinks.'" The composer of Mazeppa was certainly not the man to be surprised by lengthy developments."

"I launched into Beethoven's Thirty-two Variations in C Minor, followed by Liszt's Polonaise in E. These were received with great enthusiasm. Since I was satisfied with my performance, I was about to grant the audience some degree of understanding when my host approached, smiling. After showering me with elaborate compliments, he conveyed a message from a young officer present who asked "would I be so kind as to play now one of the piano pieces of Gabriel Fauré". I was aghast, I knew Gabriel Fauré by name, just as I had heard of some of his works, but I had never played a note of them. To my great embarrassment, I had to admit my ignorance. Afterwords I learned that this "herald" of Fauré refused to be presented to me and kept repeating querulously: "I don't understand your enthusiasm for this girl. She plays the piano very well, but she's no musician if she can't play any Fauré." The future was to change his opinion and give me my revenge. Three years later I started playing Faure; and I married that young man."

"When I arrived at Aix, I was delighted to see a poster announcing a concert of music by Fauré, to be performed under the direction of the composer. When we met he asked about my work and suggested that I play him the Schumann Concerto and his own Sixth Barcarolle which had been with me all the while. There was so much I could learn from such a teacher! Unlike Chopin and Debussy, who played their own music as no other mortal could hope to, Fauré was not a virtuoso, nor even a player of any great skill, but to hear him play taught me much of value."

"In 1903 virtually all of Fauré's piano works had been written, with the exception of some Nocturnes and Barcarolles, the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra — but they remained unheard. I plunged into them, the only difficulty, among so many masterpieces, being what to choose. I spent the rest of the summer with my sister, and, keeping to my rendez-vous, I went to Mareval to play the Franck Quintet with a group of amatuers formed by Comte de V ... That fanatical Fauré enthusiast, Joseph de Marliave, decided to be presented to me this time, and even turned the pages for me. There was a young lady there in search of a husband and already she had her eye on him. When the Quintet was finished, he asked her, without any ill intent, what she thought of the music. "It's nice," she replied, in a very knowing manner, and was disqualified at once. Some time later the young officer asked me to share his life. A long engagement followed, interspersed with many happy holidays when we played music together. A very pleasant path was opening in front of us — but for how long, alas? At the side of this enlightened admirer of this music "of fantasy and reason," as he described Fauré's work, I went forward with increased confidence in the mission which I had entrusted to myself."

"In 1905 Fauré was appointed to the post of Director of the Conservatoire National de Paris. His influence breathed a new, transforming spirit into the old institution, and his reforms were so radical that they earned him the nickname of Robespierre. "Monsieur," Théodore Dubois told him on leaving office, "do not forget that, as its name implies, the Conservatoire is intended to conserve tradition." But for Fauré, tradition had quite a different meaning. It was rooted in his knowledge of those great masters on which he himself had been reared, and not in the arbitrary study of a restrictive technique."

"In 1954 the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire asked me to play the Ballade under André Cluytens to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Fauré's death. The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was packed, I was recalled again and again, and the audience was shouting enthusiastically for the Ballade to be encored. Knowing that I was not well, André Cluytens said to me: "Don't tire yourself out." "What? Forty-seven years ago, in this very society, I was told that the Ballade was obscure, today they're shouting for an encore and you think I'm not going to play it again?" And it went down even better the second time round."

"Albéniz was indeed a man of great feeling. He worshipped Gabriel Fauré, and I can say, in all fairness, that he died with his music in his heart. [...] I shall always remember our last visit to him. It was a Sunday, and that afternoon I had been playing at the Concerts Colonne. Albéniz was leaving the next day for Cambo, where he was to die shortly afterwards. Gabriel Fauré and Paul Dukas were at his side. So as not to lose a moment of the precious time left to us to spend with our friend, I was still wearing my concert dress, whose whiteness contrasted sharply with the infinite sadness pervading the room. Albéniz, who was thin as a skeleton, was lifted up, huddled in an enormous, rough dressing gown. He said to me: "Marguerite, play me Fauré's Second Valse-Caprice. Dukas is very fond of it, too." You can guess with how much feeling I sat down to the piano. The atmosphere was oppressive. In the middle of the piece, Albéniz, who was sitting beside me, flung himself on my shoulder and sobbed: "It's all over for me. I won't hear this divine music played any more.""

"Gabriel Fauré had two maxims he was fond of and used to repeat "six times an hour": "Nuance is the thing," he would say, "not a change of movement." Or again: "The bass line is with us," and it is to Fauré that I have to thank my love of the bass line in music [sic]. How right he was. I have spent my life demonstrating the truth of this. The entire construction is built on the bass line and without it music collapses. Any musician worthy of the name has this respect for the bass line. It is the root of harmony, the fundamental support of the chord. It must always be laid down, without heaviness, of course, but with sufficient strength to balance the phrase it supports. It is the rallying point which assures stability of the formation of successive modulations. At one of the big concerts given at the Institut, Charles-Marie Widor, who was then Permanent Secretary, asked me to play some of Fauré's music. While I was playing, Widor had his eyes closed and I even thought that he was asleep. As the last note died away, he sat up and said: "Oh, what a lovely bass line." Some months later the great organist underwent an operation for cataracts. I wrote to him offering my wishes for a speedy recovery and as a postscript to his answer he added: "And that lovely bass line — I think of it yet.""

"The unintelligibility of any interpretation always derives from being played "with the same colour." It is shading that gives variety. There is a great deal to be said on this subject, one of the most delicate questions posed by playing. Of course, one must respect the requirements indicated by the composer. Nevertheless, it often happened, with Fauré beside me, that I had to differ from what was written. This would be quite impossible with Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel, who were orchestrators, a thing Gabriel Fauré was not. We knew that he was always assisted by his pupils for his orchestration of Pénélope. Fauré's phrasing was very long, his perorations endless (Debussy said: "He doesn't know how to finish"), and these required support from variety in shading. I tried to make his phrasing more striking, to enhance the value of a dynamic, to find inflections which were not accentuated, but which gave the right kind of sound to a modulation. After I had considered the effect for a long time beforehand, I would submit my proposals to the master for his approval."

"He liked crescendo and diminuendo to be short and effective just like Toscanini, who obtained in this way the most striking effects of his staggering dynamism. Fauré had adopted the rule for shading that Hans von Bülow had laid down: when one reads "crescendo," it means leaving a more "piano" tone for a reinforcement of the sound; and when one reads "diminuendo," it indicates that one is playing as loudly as one can to allow the tone to be so softened."

"Nevertheless, the paradoxes in Fauré sometimes bewildered me. Despite his very great respect for tradition, he was much less intransigent when it came to his own compositions. He could even be disconcerting. During a rehearsal of one of his works, the conductor was not sure about a point in the score, so he asked Fauré, who replied apathetically: "Well, I don't really know." One day, arriving at my house unexpectedly, he found me at the piano, playing his Theme and Variations, which had just been given as a companion-piece at the Conservatoire, of which he was the Director. I said to him: "Will you let the ascending passage in the second-last variation be played in octaves?" "Oh, no," he said, "not in octaves. I forbid it. I detest that." Nonetheless, on the day of the competition he allowed it. Why? Because at heart he did not care. For him his work was like a bottle at sea. He had other points in common with Alfred de Vigny: a patrician turn of mind and the same indifference to the work once it had been completed."

"Composed between 1893 and 1896, Dolly owes its title to the Christian name of the daughter of my friend Madame Bardac. This was the happy lot of this delightful woman for whom in 1892 Fauré had written La Bonne Chanson and who ten years later would be the noble companion of Claude Debussy. Dolly, who now is Madame de Tinan, was then a little blonde girl of charming behaviour and feminine precocity. The music which Fauré wrote for her is quite in her image. It is the only time that the composer used titles other than those of a musical genre. The album consists of six pieces: in the Berceuse one can perceive the musician's feelings in front of such childlike grace. Miau is not, as Emile Vuillermoz wrote, the name of the household cat that used to jump about mischievously, but the nickname that young Dolly gave to her brother Raoul Bardac, who was later himself a pupil of Fauré and Debussy. Le Jardin de Dolly is the garden in an enchanted dream, full of perfumed flowers, while Kitty-Valse illustrates the whirling leaps of a favourite dog. Tendresse makes clear its meaning in its delicate figurations. Finally, the Pas Espagnol is the transposition in music of the bronze equestrian statue of Frémiet, Fauré's father-in-law, which stood on a mantlepiece in Madame Bardac's house and which was much admired by young Dolly."

"The sounds of the divine Requiem ring out in my memory. They accompanied Gabriel Fauré on the day of the final farewells at the Madeleine in November 1924. I cannot hear them without our past surging up. It has been said of the Requiem that it is not "Christian" because it lessens the horror of the Dies Irae and lights up with eternal hope in its In Paradisum. Fauré's genius was in full flight when he composed his Requiem in 1887. He was much distressed by the recent death of his father, and, overwhelmed by his first confrontation between life and death, Fauré still did not any sense of revolt. The melodies of his Requiem are without violence. He did not record terror but a gentle certainty of divine mercy. "If I were God, I would have pity on the heart of man." It is the same credo that Debussy would later put in the mouth of Arkel in Pelléas et Melisande.✱"

"In March 1924 Roger Ducasse brought me the staggering message with which Gabriel Fauré had entrusted him: "I would like to die without leaving any 'scratches' and see Marguerite Long again." And he repeated once again: "No one has played my music like she has and no one has written about my music like her husband." In these last moments he wanted to erase the shadows that had tarnished our feelings. "Come and see him," Roger Ducasse insisted. "He will be waiting for you tomorrow afternoon." It was a Tuesday, I have not forgotten. When I got to his house, my heart beating, I learned that that very day, at five o'clock in the morning, Gabriel Fauré had passed away. I saw him anyway. He lay on his death bed, his features ravaged but still recognizable. This was the last time I saw him, and I cannot say what it meant to me, because Fauré's music was one of the reasons for living, because it was tied to everything that was my musical youth. I shall always remain loyal to it. For his music I have joined my belief in Fauré with an infinite gentleness, forgiveness, pardon. With it I have rejected the idea of eternal flames and unattainable Paradise. In Paradisum. It is true, as Georges Duhamel wrote in La Musique Consolatrice, that "music watches with us among the ruins and ashes of all our former happiness."

"Fauré, the direct heir of Chopin, has carried through all the methods of composition that one finds in the work of the Polish genius and in that of Liszt. He transforms them into his own style and goes further down the path opened by Chopin, since he feels all the expressive value of pure harmony. Chopin, Fauré — two of the piano's greatest lyricists."

"It has already been said that since Richard Wagner the lyric stage has not seen any work which comes as near perfection as Pénélope, nor one which so constantly reaches the heights. Nothing is truer, but however magnificent the praise it is still incomplete. What must be added is that for the first time for more than a century and a half the French scène lyrique has spoken its own language. [..] None but he, furthermore, was capable of being the hero of such a worthy mission. He is the purest musician alive today and such as we have possibly never had here. Mozart, Schubert and Chopin alone had to such an eminent degree the divine gift of producing music as spontaneously as a tree produces fruit, and no one has possessed at the same time such pure craftsmanship."

"He is assuredly the greatest musician that our country can boast of and yet showered with honours, glory, fame, Gabriel Fauré was until yesterday not the least known, but the most badly known in our country. Because he produced above all works of medium dimensions, many thought him to be nothing more than a lesser figure, a 'poeta minor' of music; because he always avoided that grandiloquence which most of Franck's pupils confused with true grandeur; because he is generally happy with moderate means in chamber music he was given the pejorative tag of 'salon musician.' As if the size mattered, or the noise of the music, or the weight of the score, as if in music the content should always be measured by the size of the shell."

"Under an ancient portrait of Glück can be read this legend: "He preferred the Muses to the Sirens." Fauré, a purer musician than the composer of the Iphigénie operas, showed in Pénélope that he could unite in harmony the voluptuous Sirens with the serious Muses of order and intelligence. So much music and so wonderful, not a useless bar, not a note more or less than is required; much substance yet little material: it was the craftsmanship of Mozart just as that of Fauré, and this simplicity which exudes dryness is so great that it can surprise us before it touches and moves us."

"Ah, it's lovely, the Ballade, it really is delightful. I am unfair to Fauré's music in so far as I don't know it very well. When we get back, you'll have to play me lots of it."

"The songs are, beyond doubt, the crown of his art. They extend throughout his lifetime and form in themselves an interesting historical study of a composer, himself somewhat reclusive, slowly and with constant ingenuity reacting to changing accents in the world outside his window. The suave, chaste elegance of the early songs (of which "Dans Les Ruines d'un abbaye" and the Schumann-esque, exalted "Après un Reve" are the best known), through a quiet struggle of conscience with Wagnerian harmony (most of all in the settings of Verlaine from the 1890s), to a bashful nod toward musical Impressionism in the very last cycle, L'Horizon chimerique of 1922. Not a song in this vast output is less than exquisite; the fashion I have sometimes encountered, of not taking this music seriously, ought to be put to rest by the evidence these two albums contain."

"He lacks the one fault which for an artist is a quality — ambition."

"How can it be that I did not know a work like that? I am bowled over by what I have heard."

"To love and understand Fauré constitutes a privilege from which it is difficult not to derive a sort of innocent pride. It is the mark of a subtle ear, the flattering indication of a refined sensibility."

"To love and understand Fauré, one must at all costs have a musical nature. Fauré is pure music in the strictest, acoustic meaning of the word. It is no good bringing anything in the way of painter's or sculptor's gifts to listen to him. One may be unmusical and still love Beethoven or Berlioz. That is what explains the imposing number of the clientele of these two composers. But the same does not apply to Fauré. If you are not sensible to the pleasure given by certain modulations, if you do not taste the disturbing flavor of certain harmonies, if you are not interested in the subtle laws of the gravitation of notes around a tonic, a dominant or leading note, you will understand nothing of this style, disconcerting in its apparent simplicity. Certain foreign amateurs of music have experienced no difficulty in becoming initiated into the style of Debussy or Ravel, but they are put off by the nonchalant fluidity of Fauré's writing, which under its apparent classicism contains the most magnificent revolutionary audacities. There is between this music and the great majority of listeners of every country a terrible lack of comprehension."

"I am not a composer, I’m a clerk."

"Deep Purple are responsible for an awfully lot of what we would come to know as heavy metal, so it might be surprising to learn that the band’s keyboardist was one of their driving forces. A classically-trained pianist, Lord fused blues, jazz, rock and classical styles to add a bit of sophistication to the bombastic barrages of Deep Purple, Whitesnake and more. He focused on the Hammond C3, though he was equally adept with a Minimoog. An outstanding and often overlooked player."

"Dowghter, in this I can thinke no other But that it is true thys proverbe olde, Hastye love is soone hot and soone colde!"

"Both as an organist and composer he ranks high."

"Die Warheit zu sagen, so höret oder siehet man selten einen Streit swischen ihnen; es trauen die fremdesten Leute einander mehr, als in Europa die Bekannten. Man ist auch viel aufrichtiger und liebreicher gegeneinander als in Teutschland, darum leben unsere Americaner viel ruhiger und friedsamer als die Europäer zusammen, und dieses alles macht die Freyheit, worinnen alle einander gleich sind."