Quotes
About Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart
is sunshine. - Antonin Dvorak, quoted in
Otakar Sourek (ed.), Antonin Dvorak: Letters and
Reminiscences (1954)
O
Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, how infinitely
many inspiring suggestions of a finer, better life
have you left in our souls! - Franz Schubert,
Diary, 1816
Mozart's
music is so beautiful as to entice angels down to
earth. - Franz Alexander von Kleist
Mozart's
joy is made of serenity, and a phrase of his music
is like a calm thought; his simplicity is merely
purity. It is a crystalline thing in which all the
emotions play a role, but as if already celestially
transposed. Moderation consists in feeling emotions
as the angels do. - André Gide
A
world that has produced a Mozart is a world worth
saving. What a picture of a better world you have
given us, Mozart! - Franz Schubert
Mozart
makes you believe in God because it cannot be by
chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this
world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled
masterpieces. - Georg Solti
Mozart
is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven created
his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity
and beauty that one feels he merely found it - that
it has always existed as part of the inner beauty
of the universe waiting to be revealed. -
Albert Einstein
In
Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally
the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart,
the divine instinct. - Edvard Grieg
There
was nothing exceptional about the physical presence
of this extraordinary man; he was small and his
appearance gave no sign of his genius, apart from
his large intense eyes. [...] But in this ungainly
body there dwelt an artistic genius such as Nature
rarely bestows even upon her most treasured darlings.
- Franz Niemetschek
Mozart
combined high formality and playfulness that delights
as no other composition in any other medium does.
- Roy Blount, Jr.
In
my dreams of heaven, I always see the great Masters
gathered in a huge hall in which they are reside.
Only Mozart has his own suite. - Victor Borge
For
one moment in the history of music all opposites
were reconciled; all tensions resolved; that luminous
moment was Mozart. - Phil Goulding
Mozart's
music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual
kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner
being and arouse a higher, intensive life. -
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Designing
an opera by Mozart is like doing something for God
- it's a labor of love. - Maurice Sendak
Mozart
combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity
into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all
hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the
spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of
suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs
to all ages. - Leonard Bernstein
Mozart exists, and will exist, eternally; divine
Mozart - less a name, more a soul descending to
us from the heavens, who appeared on this earth,
stayed for a little over thirty years, and left
it all the more rejuvenated, richer and happier
for his appearance. - Charles Gounod
Mozart
is the highest, the culminating point that beauty
has attained in the sphere of music. - Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Mozart is the musical Christ. - Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky
What
was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing
music completely finished in his head. And finished
as most music is never finished. Displace one note
and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase
and structure would fall. I was staring through
the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at Absolute
Beauty. - Peter Shaffer
Mozart touched no problem without solving it to
perfection. - Donald Francis Tovey
He
roused my admiration when I was young; he caused
me to despair when I reached maturity; he is now
the comfort of my old age. - Gioachino Rossini
21 piano sonatas, 27 piano concertos, 41 symphonies,
18 masses, 13 operas, 9 oratorios and cantata, 2
ballets, 40 plus concertos for various instruments,
string quartets, trios and quintets, violin and
piano duets piano quartets, and the songs. This
astounding output includes hardly one work less
than a masterpiece. - George Snell
Mozart
in his music was probably the most reasonable of
the world's great composers. It is the happy balance
between flight and control, between sensibility
and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication
of style that is his particular province... Mozart
tapped once again the source from which all music
flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and
refinement and breath-taking rightness that has
never since been duplicated. - Aaron Copland,
Copland on Music (1960)
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