Pianists From France

"Nothing is more beautiful than a good guitar, save perhaps two."

"Chopin‘s pianistic production is overall more voluminous and somewhat more consistent in emotional substance, however wonderful much of Schumann‘s work is."

"Chopin did not need to append words to music to make it songful; in fact it seems to me that he does better without them! Incidentally, their lack of popularity must largely be due to their being set to Polish words, and as far as I know, translating them would lessen their effect."

"Chopin is -- popularly, but not critically -- seen primarily as a great melodist, which reputation does him a great disservice."

"Chopin wrote many small pieces – mazurkas, waltzes, préludes, nocturnes – many more than Schumann. That covers the needs of millions of amateurs who love music, but do not command the instrument well enough and who love Chopin’s music. It enters their hearts."

"Chopin is played much more than Schumann in China, both in concert halls and music schools. The reason, if I put it in a most simple and direct way, Chopin is more universal, appeals more to the masses. Schumann is more personal, appeals more to the elites."

"Being Chopin a pianist himself, his works are mainly conceived for the piano. When people use the word “pianistic“, it means that the pieces lay easily, naturally and smoothly under the fingers. This is true for Liszt and Debussy too."

"Music was his language, the divine tongue through which he expressed a whole realm of sentiments that only the select few can appreciate... The muse of his homeland dictates his songs, and the anguished cries of Poland lend to his art a mysterious, indefinable poetry which, for all those who have truly experienced it, cannot be compared to anything else... The piano alone was not sufficient to reveal all that lies within him. In short he is a most remarkable individual who commands our highest degree of devotion."

"According to a tradition—and, be it said, an erroneous one—Chopin’s playing was like that of one dreaming rather than awake—scarcely audible in its coninual pianissiomos and una cordoas, with feebly developed technique and quite lacking in confidence, or at least indistinct, and distorted out of all rhythmic form by an incessant tempo rubato! The effect of these notions could not be otherwise than very prejudicial to the interpretation of his works, even by the most able artists—in their very striving after truthfulness; besides, they are easily accounted for."

"In keeping time Chopin was inflexible, and many will be surprised to learn that the metronome never left his piano. Even in his oft-decried tempo rubato one hand—that having the accompaniment—always played on in strict time, while the other, singing the melody, either hesitating as if undecided, or, with increased animation, anticipating with a kind of impatient vehemence as if in passionate utterances, maintained the freedom of musical expression from the fetters of strict regularity."

"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring."

"There is no weak piece by Chopin. Still, his music is played so poorly so often, and that does not do him any good. The Sonata in B flat minor and the ballad in G minor are played much very often. It does not mean I wouldn’t play them, but I wouldn’t do it so much."

"It was Chopin who properly set romantic pianism on its rails and gave it the impetus that shows no signs of deceleration. He did this all by himself, evolving from nowhere the most beautiful and original piano style of the century."

"Chopin was a romantic who hated romanticism. This is the paradox. It was Chopin who, of all the early romantics, has turned out the most popular. Virtually everything he composed has remained in the repertoire, and a piano recital without some Chopin on it is still the exception. […] In his day he was a revolutionary. To many his music was exotic, inexplicable, perhaps insane. Critics like Rellstab in Germany, Chorley and Davison in England, dismissed much of Chopin’s music as eccentricities full of earsplitting dissonance."

"Fortunately the picture as it stands is quite complete, and the figure of Chopin clearly emerges: that marvelously controlled, original, poetic, nuanced classic-romantic pianist and musician, whose physical resources may have been small but whose spirit and conception were epical."

"Hats off, gentlemen — a genius!"

"If the mighty autocrat of the north knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin's works in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin's works are canons buried in flowers."

"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own."

"We couldn’t do much outside. I found more details in my music."

"Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully."

"Chopin has done for the piano what Schubert has done for the voice."

"Give me a kiss, dearest lover. I'm certain that you still love me, and I fear you always, like some tyrant over me. I don't know why, but I fear you. Upon my word, only you have power over me, you and... no one else."

"J'ai osé beaucoup, mais la prochaine fois, vous verrez, j'oserai plus encore..."

"What I am trying to do is something different — an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art."

"Music is the space between the notes."

"It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion."

"Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory. … Let us not disillusion anyone by bringing too much reality into the dream."

"I believe the principle fault of the majority of writers and artists is having neither the will nor the courage to break with their successes, failing to seek new paths and give birth to new ideas. Most of them produce them twice, three, even four times. They have neither the courage nor the temerity to leave what is certain for what is uncertain. There is, however, no greater pleasure than going into the depth of oneself, setting one's whole being in motion and seeking for new and hidden treasures. What a joy to find something new in oneself, something that surprises even ourselves, filling us with warmth."

"Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourelf be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind..."

"To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love."

"When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, “Let’s go. He’s starting to develop.”"

"I don't know what life would be like without music. In my lonely times, music has been my closest friend. It has also been my doctor-and my lover, in the sense that I sometimes listen to music and dream of a lover that doesn't exist. Late at night, when I don't feel sleepy, I'll play music-all types of music and lose myself in its mystery. I might decide to play Stevie Wonder, or Debussy, or Tchaikovsky. It depends on my mood."

"I love Italian opera — it’s so reckless. Damn Richard Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their immortal souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate."

"Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon — a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary..."

"When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir — "whatever I please" — and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity..."

"An examination of the harmonic techniques out of their context has all too often led to misleading terminology such as 'static' or 'non-functional' as a description of Debussy's harmonic methods. Viewed as a whole, however, the tonal coherence of his music depends upon a carefully calculated and often dramatic interaction of these various harmonic 'types' with each other and with orthodox diatonic harmony. The result is a tonal language, but one which is fundamentally different in concept from classical tonality. The detailed classifications of harmonic events is no longer possible in Debussy's music where the central tonality of a work emerges only through a constant focusing and re-focusing on harmonic types."

"The Sea of Debussy does not call for many words of comment. The three parts of which it is composed are entitled From Dawn till Noon, Play of the Waves and Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, but as far as any pictorial suggestiveness is concerned, they might as well have been entitled On the Flatiron Building, Slumming in the Bowery and A Glimpse of Chinatown During a Raid. Debussy's music is the dreariest kind of rubbish. Does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy would not write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff, if he could invent a melody?... Even his orchestration is not particularly remarkable."

"Among all our musical masters, l should say, Claude Debussy was the least weighed upon by the dead hand of formula. Yet neither was he an improviser. This latter art, indeed, among all the compositional techniques, is the one most servile to rules of thumb. Debussy's operation was more thorough. Like any Frenchman building a bridge or cooking a meal, painting a picture or laying out a garden, he felt, he imagined, he reasoned, he constructed—and in that order."

"Music expresses the motion of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes."

"How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling."

"Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light."

"Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called "common sense", which is the most dreadful thing I know — after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!"

"There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art."

"The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams."

"Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little — the book of Nature."

"People don't very much like things that are beautiful — they are so far from their nasty little minds."

"Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music."

"A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn."

"Music should humbly seek to please; within these limits great beauty may perhaps be found. Extreme complication is contrary to art. Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part."

"The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen."