A Quote by Paul McCartney

I have always adored Mahler, and Mahler was a major influence on the music of the Beatles. John and me used to sit and do the Kindertotenlieder and Wunderhorn for hours, we'd take turns singing and playing the piano. We thought Mahler was gear.

Paul McCartney

Quote Topics

Adored Always Beatles Gear Hours Influence John Mahler Major Me Music Piano Playing Singing Sit Take Thought Turns Used

Quote Author

Paul McCartney
English - Singer
Born: June 18, 1942

For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.

Gustavo Dudamel

We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection.

Philip Kitcher

Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth!

Malcolm Arnold

I found a deep kinship between Mahler's recurrent attempts to confront all sides of life and to affirm himself in the face of his own finitude, and Aschenbach's dedication to persevere in the literary evocation of beauty. Exploring this kinship led me to reflect on many of Mahler's songs and symphonies - and particularly his great masterpiece, Das Lied von der Erde. The end result was a way of reading Mann that I hadn't originally anticipated at all.

Philip Kitcher

Presenting Aschenbach as a composer - based on Mahler - leads to some dreadful scenes (especially those in which Aschenbach is berated by his student), and it surely distorts the character Mann created. Yet, we know that Mann's novella was based on a holiday in Venice he took with his wife and brother, and that while he was there he followed the reports in the German newspapers, describing the dying Mahler's progress as he returned from New York to Vienna.

Philip Kitcher

I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.

I. M. Pei

Conducting is a natural way to participate in one's own music. Almost every 19th-century composer Mendelssohn, Mahler was conducting or playing his own music. Mozart did both.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.

Rufus Wainwright

Some movies work really well with music from Bach or Mahler that existed long before the film, so music has its own autonomy.

Ennio Morricone

I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor.

Simon Rattle

I think that the first World War put an end the kind of music that Mahler, Bruckner and Richard Strauss were writing. A change of fashion was needed.

Julian Bream

My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.

Patti LuPone

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

Clive James

Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.

Philip Kitcher

I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.

Philip Kitcher

I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.

Simon Rattle