Composers From Austria

"For a month now I have been an out-and-out vegetarian. The moral effect of this way of life, with its voluntary castigation of the body, causing one's material needs to dwindle away, is enormous. You can judge for yourself how utterly I [am] convinced of it, when I tell you that I expect of it no less than the regeneration of humanity. All I can tell you is: let yourself be converted to a natural way of living, but one in which you eat suitable food (compost-grown, stone-ground, wholemeal bread) and soon you will see the fruits of your endeavours."

"Tradition ist nicht die Anbetung der Asche, sondern die Weitergabe des Feuers."

"It really lives up to its name, doesn't it? Mahler's 4th Symphony."

"Ich weiß für mich, daß ich, solang ich mein Erlebnis in Worten zusammenfassen kann, gewiß keine Musik hierüber machen würde."

"Haydn is, together with Schumann, probably the most neglected and misunderstood of the greatest composers. Some might argue with this statement by saying that Haydn's works are frequently performed and that he has long been recognised as the father figure of Viennese Classicism. Papa Haydn has become one of the worst clichés in classical music. It degrades one of history's most innovative composers into a lovable but minor figure."

"If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music, and on high personages in particular, how inimitable are Mozart's works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive! (for this is how I understand them, how I feel them) — why then the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel within their frontiers. Prague should hold him fast — but should reward him, too: for without this, the history of great geniuses is sad indeed, and gives but little encouragement to posterity to further exertions; and unfortunately this is why so many promising intellects fall by the wayside."

"Ich sage ihnen vor Gott, als ein ehrlicher Mann, ihr Sohn ist der größte Componist, den ich von Person und den Nahmen nach kenne: er hat geschmack, und über das die größte Compositionswissenschaft."

"Dear Haydn, how I love you! But other pianists? They're rather lukewarm towards you. Which is a great shame."

"Give Him thanks, all ye His works so wondrous! Sing His honor, sing His glory, bless and magnify His Name! Jehovah’s praise endures forevermore, Amen, Amen!."

"For me," he explains his mammoth project, "it is an obligation to know and learn to understand the various styles living within the guitar, to work with them and pursue them up to a certain point and, when I feel I have learned enough about them, to let them go again. These CDs are a form of pool, a rucksack with everything I have at the moment and what I have focused on."

"Music was destined to reach its culmination in the likeness of itself."

"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."

""My works are 12-tone compositions, not 12-tone compositions"

"An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker — the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art."

"Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value. … Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value — a value that can be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic value."

"Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution and refinement are everywhere. Everything has to "make a good impression" — whether or not it is any good: the impression is the main thing."

"I have just read your book [On the Spiritual in Art] from cover to cover, and I will read it once more. I find it pleasing to an extraordinary degree, because we agree on nearly all of the main issues.."

"Now we will throw these mediocre kitsch-mongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God."

"There are no more geniuses, only critics."

"Hauer looks for laws. Good. But he looks for them where he will not find them."

"I find above all that the expression, "atonal music," is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying "the art of not falling," or swimming "the art of not drowning.""

"If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears…"

"My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers."

"I see the work as a whole first. Then I compose the details. In working out, I always lose something. This cannot be avoided. There is always some loss when we materialize. But there is compensating gain in vitality."

"There is a great Man living in this country — a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives."

"...if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art."

"I believe that he (Strauss) will remain one of the characteristic and outstanding figures in musical history. Works like Salome, Elektra and Intermezzo, and others will not perish."

"I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes."

"My music is not lovely."

"My music is not modern, it is merely badly played"

"I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!""

"I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire."

"A regular Friday audience, 90 percent feminine and 100 percent well-bred, sat stoically yesterday through thirty minutes of the most cacophonous world premiere ever heard here - the first performance anywhere of a new Violin Concerto by Arnold Schoenberg. Yesterday's piece combines the best sound effects of a hen yard at feeding time, a brisk morning in Chinatown and practice hour at a busy music conservatory. The effect on the vast majority of hearers is that of a lecture on the fourth dimension delivered in Chinese."

"In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my painting."

"At the moment there is a great tendency in painting to discover the 'new' harmony by constructive means whereby the rhythmic is built on an almost geometric form.. .I am certain that our own modern harmony is not to be found in the 'geometric' way, but rather in the anti-geometric, anti-logical way. And this way is that of 'dissonance in art', in painting, therefore, just as much as in music. And 'today's' dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of 'tomorrow'."

"[Schonberg's] music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins."

"Can you imagine a music in which tonality (that is, the adherence to any key) is completely suspended? I was constantly reminded of Kandinsky's large composition which also permits no trace of tonality.. ..and also of Igor Kandinsky's 'jumping spots' in hearing this music [of Schoenberg], which allows each tone sounded to stand on its own (a kind of white canvas between the spots of color). Schoenberg proceeds from the principle that the concepts of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a more remote consonance – an idea which now occupies me constantly while painting.. - note 6"

"In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written."

"Richard Strauss on Schoenberg, written by Schoenberg himself: "Dear Sir, I regret that I am unable to accept your invitation to write something for Richard Strauss's fiftieth birthday. In a letter to Frau Mahler (in connection with Mahler Memorial Fund) Herr Strauss wrote about me as follows: 'The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist ...". "I think he'd do better to shovel snow instead of scribbling on music-paper...'"

"My brother was a rather pretty child."

"Livepictures from Mozart Birthhous in Salzburg"

"openmozart.net: Friedrich Rochlitz forgery"

"Excluding and banning the sublime work of Mozart in the Temple for his masonry militancy seems ridiculous and even offensive to all "men of good will" who love only and above all great classical music, which they do not look with any prejudice at the choices made in life by any genius, and they do not think at all that his celestial notes could harm the soul of anyone or even disturb that of the Franciscan fathers."

"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

"He brought to the classical symphony not only depths of expression but the idea that the musical phrase is inextricably bound up with the particular colouration of the instrument that plays it."

"In relation to God he is like a child who brings everything to his father: the stones from the street and peculiar sticks and little plants and even once a ladybug; and with him all of these things are melodies, melodies that he brings to God, melodies that he suddenly knows when he is inside of prayer. And when he has finished praying, and he is no longer on his knees and no longer has his hands folded, then he sits there at the piano, or he sings with an incredible childlikeness, and in doing so he no longer has any idea whether he is playing something for God or whether it is God who is using him to play something at once for himself and for Mozart. There is a great conversation between Mozart and God that is the purest prayer, and this entire conversation is nothing but music."

"Mozart was the Shakespeare of music; and as long as the immortal bard is read, Mozart will live in the admiration of mankind. He has reached the passions through the ear as Shakspeare did through the mind, and no works will live that do not touch the passions and the heart — they are the same in all ages, and will make Shakspeare and Mozart a poet and a composer "For all time"."

"What was evident was that Mozart was simply written down music already finished in his head. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty."

"Pascal and Felix Mendelssohn were prodigiously precocious. But when each died before reaching age forty, each was physiologically an old man. Not so with Mozart – from him could have been extrapolated as much again in the future as had generously erupted in the past."

"But what is it about Mozart? Is there a pianist alive who really manages to play him well? Casadesus, whom I heard in Odessa in the F major Sonata K 332 – it must be about a century ago – left an unforgettable impression, a miracle such as one rarely witnesses. And then there was Neuhaus, who played the A minor Rondo in so touching a manner that it almost reduced you to tears. It's odd, but Haydn – who seems after all to be fairly close to Mozart in terms of genius – is infinitely less difficult to play (he's almost easy in fact). So what's Mozart's secret?"