Emperor Joseph II: Your work is ingenious. It's quality work, and there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and ...it will be perfect. Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, majesty?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and ...sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever else it may be--stimulus, tranquilizer, aural nipple, too of executives, Muzak is basically trivializing. It is not simpl...y that it relegates music to the province of wallpaper. Background music never need be banal. When it is used in support of drama, it can greatly enhance without harming itself. Mozart was entirely amenable to such films as Elvira Madigan and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote aptly for The Invaders, Arnold Bax for Oliver Twist, Sergei Prokofiev for Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich for others. In such uses, music collaborates with artists, it becomes an art among arts. But Muzak collaborates chiefly with management: it is used as an aural smoke-screen, a form of jamming, a hormone in the henhouse, an emollient in cemeteries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mozart starved, but you allow Thalberg and Liszt make tons of gold: Of course, you may think that someone immortal cannot die of h...unger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao tse and Christ. Ke...ep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The jazz musician is denied the dignity accorded the composer because not everything he composes is first written down, or, necess...arily, written down afterward, or, once written down, considered immutable. And he is denied the dignity accorded the Serious-music performer because the latter is an "interpreter" of presumably great music. The musician, in other words, who makes up his music as he goes along, or makes up a good deal of it, or who rarely plays the same music twice in the same way, is, we are given to understand, inferior to the musician who makes no music of his own. For all his undisputed virtuosity and inventive fancy, the jazz musician cannot, we are led to believe, be granted equality with the Serious musician who can read and play the notes written down for him by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner a century or so ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetr...y begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipati...on of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up b...y a glass of brandy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »