Composers From Italy

"If then we would be saved, we must, even until death, have our lips ever opened to pray and say: "My God, help me; my God, have mercy; Mary, have mercy." If we cease to pray, we shall be lost. Let up pray for ourselves and let us pray for sinners, for this is so pleasing to God."

"Ungrateful soul, not to forego its own miserable gratifications, it consented to lose God."

"The hope of those who commit sin because God is forgiving, is an abomination in his sight: their hope, says holy Job, is an abomination. Hence the sinner, by such hope, provokes God to chastise him the sooner, as that servant would provoke his master, who, because his master was good, took advantage of his goodness to behave ill."

"He who builds a house for himself takes great pains to make it commodious, airy, and handsome, and says: “I labour and give myself a great deal of trouble about this house, because I shall have to live in it all my life.” And yet how little is the house of eternity thought of!"

"While others amass the fortunes of this world, may my only fortune be Thy holy grace."

"The soul enters eternity alone and unattended, except by its works. Woe to me! where are my works to accompany me to a blessed eternity? I can discover none but such as render me deserving of eternal torments."

"[Regarding Origen] His name was so famous at that time that all the priests and doctors consulted him in any difficult matter... Those, he says, who adhere to the letter of the Scripture will never see the kingdom of God, hence we should seek the spirit of the word, which is hidden and mysterious. p. 46... He taught many other erroneous opinions; in fact his doctrine is entirely infected with the maxims of Plato, Pythagoras, and the Manicheans. p. 48... After the death of Origen his followers disturbed the Church very much by maintaining and propagating his errors... Finally, in the twelfth canon of the second council of Constantinople, both Origen and all those who would persist in defending his doctrine were condemned. p. 49"

"“But one thing is necessary,” (Luke 10:42), and it is not beauty, not health, not talent. It is the salvation of our immortal souls."

"At death all our hope of salvation will come from the testimony of our conscience as to whether or not we are dying resigned to God’s will."

"The preacher should often speak of the love which Jesus Christ bears towards us, of the love which we should bear to Jesus Christ, and of the confidence we should have in his mercy whenever we are resolved to amend our lives. It would appear that some preachers do not know how to speak of anything but the justice of God, terrors, threats, and chastisements. There is no doubt but that terrifying discourses are of use to arouse sinners from the sleep of sin; but we should be persuaded at the same time, that those who abstain from sin solely through the fear of punishment, will with difficulty persevere for a long time. Love is that golden link which binds the soul to God, and makes it faithful in repelling temptation and practising virtue."

"With regard to the subject matter of sermons. Those subjects should be selected which move most powerfully to detest sin and to love God; whence the preacher should often speak of the last things—of death, of judgment, of Hell, of Heaven, and of eternity. According to the advice of the Holy Spirit, “Memorare novissima tua, et in æternum non peccabis,” (Ecclesiasticus 7:40,) it is particularly useful often to make mention of death, by delivering several discourses on that subject during the year, speaking at one time on the uncertainty of death, which terminates all the pleasures as well as all the afflictions of this life; at another, on the uncertainty of the time at which death may arrive; now, on the unhappy death of the sinner; and again, on the happy death of the just."

"My Jesus, I love Thee with my whole heart, and I desire to be always united with Thee. Since I cannot now receive Thee sacramentally, I receive Thee spiritually. Come, then, into my heart; I embrace Thee, and unite myself wholly to Thee, and I beg Thee not to permit me to be ever separated from Thee."

"Let us examine in what true wisdom consists, and we shall see, in the first point, that sinners are truly foolish, and, in the second, that the saints are truly wise."

"Prayer must be humble: God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Here St. James tells us that God does not listen to the prayers of the proud, but resists them; while, on the other hand, he is always ready to hear the prayers of the humble."

"Ad Jesum per Mariam."

"The musician who has a picture in front of him has an interpretative funnel and must be careful what happens in the history and images. The other thing is the viewer’s attention. When they are on TV they can easily switch channel. This requires put both the assembly of the story and how the story is told, captures the viewer’s attention constantly."

"Even in the greatest Westerns, the woman is imposed on the action, as a star, and is generally destined to be “had” by the male lead. But she does not exist as a woman. If you cut her out of the film, in a version which you can imagine, the film becomes much better. In the desert, the essential problem was to survive. Women were an obstacle to survival! Usually, the woman not only holds up the story, but she has no real character, no reality. She is a symbol. She is there without having any reason to be there, simply because one must have a woman, and because the hero must prove, in some way or another, that he has "sex-appeal.""

"I am showing the Old West as it really was. Cinema takes violence from life. Not the other way around. Americans treat Westerns with too much rhetoric."

"Questo è il bacio di Tosca! (Floria Tosca)"

"Ho tante cose che ti voglio dire, o una sola, ma grande come il mare, come il mare profonda ed infinita...Sei il mio amore e tutta la mia vita! (Mimì)"

"in te ravviso --il sogno ch'io vorrei sempre sognar! (Rodolfo)"

"Whatever the atmosphere he wanted to create, Giacomo Puccini’s sound world is unique and unmistakeable with its opulent yet clear-cut orchestration and a miraculous fund of melodies with their bittersweet, tender lyricism. His masterly writing for the voice guarantees the survival of his music for many years to come."

"Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma. (Floria Tosca)"

"When I’m creating at the piano, I tend to feel happy;but - the eternal dilemma - how can we be happy amid the unhappines, of other? I’d do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happines. That’s what’s at the heart of my music."

"{\clef treble \key c \minor \time 4/4 {d8 c8 ees8 c8 d8 c8 aes'8 bes'8 | g'2 r8 g'8 c8 ees8|} }"

"is an enchanted thing like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion. Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;like the apteryx-awl as a beak, or the kiwi's rain-shawl of haired feathers, the mind feeling its way as though blind, walks with its eyes on the ground.It has memory's ear that can hear without having to hear. Like the gyroscope's fall, truly unequivocal because trued by regnant certainty,it is a power of strong enchantment. It is like the dove- neck animated by sun; it is memory's eye; it's conscientious inconsistency.It tears off the veil; tears the temptation, the mist the heart wears, from its eyes -- if the heart has a face; it takes apart dejection. It's fire in the dove-neck'siridescence; in the inconsistencies of Scarlatti. Unconfusion submits its confusion to proof; it's not a Herod's oath that cannot change."

"Domenico Scarlatti produced the vast body of instrumental music for which he’s best known, and in particular the keyboard sonatas. These works extended the genre immeasurably, introducing a virtuosity and brilliance that broke new ground."

"I address myself to the young. They alone will have to listen to me, they alone will be able to understand me. Some people are born already old, drooling specters from the past, cryptograms tumid with poisons: to them, no words or ideas except a single injunction: the end."

"All innovators, logically speaking, have been Futurists in relation to their time. Palestrina would have thought that Bach was crazy, and Bach would have thought Beethoven the same, and Beethoven would have thought Wagner equally so."

"CONCLUSIONS"

"Musicas-machinery-noise and urban-sound-as-music received their first notable currency among the Italian Futurists in the immediate prewar years. Balilla Pratella and his “ideologist” Luigi Russolo yearned for a music that not only celebrated the city in some programmatic way but that reproduced it."

"When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic."

"Knowledge of instrumentation should be acquired through experience. Instrumental composition should be conceived instrumentally, imagining and hearing a particular orchestra for each particular and diverse musical condition of the mind."

"I feel that the end of my days is drawing near; my senses are failing me; my delight and strength in creating songs are gone; he, who was once honored by half of Europe, is forgotten; others have come and are the objects of admiration; one must give place to another. Nothing remains for me but trust in God, and the hope of an unclouded existence in the Land of Peace."

"[Salieri] did not harbor a grudge against Mozart, who eclipsed him; but whenever he spotted a weak point in Mozart he drew his students' attention to it. Thus one day, when I was alone with Salieri, he divulged that Mozart had completely misinterpreted the final scene of the first act in "Titus." Rome is burning; the whole population is in revolt; the music ought to rage and be tumultuous; but Mozart chose a slow, solemn tempo and rather expressed dread and horror. I did not let Salieri confuse me, and still agree with Mozart's views. As far as I know, Salieri missed only one performance of "Don Juan." This work must have interested him particularly; but I have no idea whether he ever commented about it enthusiastically."

"Moreover, most of the child composers known from the second half of the century composed relatively little: only Strauss (1864–1949) and Busoni (1866–1924) produced works in numbers that rival those of Mozart and Mendelssohn, with Bartók (1881–1945), Enescu (1881–1955), Prokofiev (1891–1953), Langgaard (1893–1952), and Korngold (1897–1957) some way behind."

"Music is the art of sounds in the movement of time."

"Compared with this art, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire is lukewarm lemonade."

"Until the autumn of 1934 I had no harpsichord of my own. But a group of people in Boston made it possible for me to buy the Dolmetsch-Chickering instrument that had belonged to Busoni (illus.1). I used this instrument for the first time in Boston at the Harvard Musical Association. This concert began inauspiciously enough with my leaving behind the key to the instrument in Cambridge, and having to send someone to fetch it."

"Busch suggested that Serkin should go to Berlin to study with Ferruccio Busoni (who, as it happens, was a close friend of Isidor Philipp’s). “The next day,” concludes Leonie Gombrich, “father Serkin came, and everything was settled.”"

"Berlin’s most eminent musical personality in the early interwar years was the great pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni, who had returned there from Zurich in 1920, summoned, like Schreker, to help build the cultural life of the new Republic."

"Serkin and Busch prepared Busoni’s second violin sonata for performance. Busoni gave them an audience and was pleased with their performance. (He told Serkin he was too old for lessons, but that he should attend as many concerts as possible and play with more pedal.) Shortly afterward, Serkin and Busch heard Busoni and Egon Petri play the same piece (on November 16, 1921 in the Beethoven-Saal, in an arrangement for two pianos) at twice their tempo."

"Serkin began to record in the late 1920s. His first effort was on piano rolls with the Freiburg firm of Welte. Its Welte-Mignon recording and playing mechanisms had yielded over five thousand rolls since 1904, rendering ghostly, automated performances by many of the period’s best-known composers and pianists, including Saint-Saens, Grieg, Fauré, Mahler, Paderewski, Debussy, D’Albert, Strauss, Busoni, Scriabin, Ravel, Respighi, and Bartók."

"Like Liszt, for whom he had a profound admiration, Ferruccio Busoni devoted a significant part of his output to arrangement in all its forms: straightforward reductions, transcriptions, fantasies on operatic themes, concert versions, and Nachdichtungen. Indeed, for many years, Busoni's name his been unfortunately associated more with his transcriptions, especially those of Johann Sebastian Bach's organ works, than with his original compositions."

"Despite the important ideas and stimuli for new works that his presence in the United States brought him, Busoni's interest in America appeared to be in the financial reward that he could reap from concert tours. Frequent performances and constant travel undoubtedly took precious time from his composing schedule, which might help to explain the negative comments that he made about the United States, its people, and the state of music-making in this country. Extended periods of absence from the cultural ambience of Europe, where he had been raised, was painful for him, as were the countless receptions that he attended with well-meaning amateurs, as well as the constant pressure for publicity by his agent and, above all, the cultural differences between Europe and America."

"What most piano teachers mean by a beautiful tone is centered on bringing out the melody, and always setting the melody in high relief is characteristic of Viennese piano style. Ferrucio Busoni, ideologically more Viennese than Italian, once said that “any melody worth playing should be played mezzo forte”; in the end, this leads to the typical conservatory performance of a Bach fugue with the opening motif played louder than all the other voices each time it appears. Most theories about beautiful piano tone try to impose the same kind of sound on every style from Bach to Debussy."

"Another noteworthy fact is that Ferruccio Busoni, who also developed the Liszt piano tradition, began his teaching career at the Moscow Conservatoire. He worked there only one year (1889-90) but among his students was Yelena Gnesina."

"Gli artisti veramente superiori giudicano senza pregiudizi di scuole, di nazionalità, di tempo. Se gli artisti del Nord e del Sud hanno tendenze diverse, è bene siano diverse."

"Si rinunci per moda, per smania di novità, per affettazione di scienza, si rinneghi l'arte nostra, il nostro istinto, quel nostro fare sicuro spontaneo naturale sensibile abbagliante di luce, è assurdo e stupido."

"Copiare il vero può essere una buona cosa, ma inventare il vero è meglio, molto meglio."