Top 390 Mozart Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.

Plenty of people detested Michael Jackson before his death wiped away the world's collective memory. Timberlake was originally dismissed as just another boy-bander. Legions have joined in a 'Hate Anne Hathaway' movement. Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Kristen Bell, even Mozart had haters.

I had to learn all the pieces backward and forward [to play it in "Florence Foster Jenkins"]. We practiced on weekends. It was very much like being in school, except it was with Meryl Streep. Like, I would go to her apartment and we would practice Mozart's "Queen of the Night."

Suppose Mozart had tried to be original? It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all of the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.

With a computer, there are too many choices, and I always liked working within limits. You know, if you look at Mozart, who had this strict classical framework - an allegro, an andante, a scherzo and a finale - you see that within that formula, he got results he might never have gotten if he had all the options in the world.

Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they're going to get a C in my class, and so my classes tend to have like four students in them. It's really a lot of fun.

Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men.

I went to college on a classical piano scholarship. My grandmother made me practice one full hour a day. Every day. Man. I thought all she wanted was for me not to have any fun. Next thing you know, you have a career in music. Now, not everybody's going to go on and be Mozart or Michael Jackson. But music makes you smarter.

Mozart's mental grip never loosens; he never abandons himself to any one sense; even at his most ecstatic moments his mind is vigorous, alert, and on the wing. He dives unerringly on to his finest ideas like a bird of prey, and once an idea is seized he soars off again with an undiminished power.

Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses - they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting.

I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, 'You can like Mozart and ice hockey...' - and then I used to say 'golf,' but Tiger took over golf! - 'and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.'

Mozart, who was buried in a pauper’s grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.

The extraordinary thing about Irving Berlin is that he's like the American Mozart! It seems as if his songs were always there. How do you put together songs like 'Always' or 'Cheek To Cheek'? Songs of his are, frankly, perfect.

But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former.

I like entertainment. I'm an innate admirer of good entertainment. I'll listen to MTV, I'll listen to Mozart, I'll listen to anything that has a good element in it.

Classical music, fortunately or not, unfolds in time. It's not like a picture you can stare at for 10 seconds or 10 hours. You need the minimum amount of education and training, and society needs to find a way to study music - not only the performances, but how to compose, how to understand why Mozart was great at what he did.

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour's work as for a day's. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the lamb.

The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.

What are you listening to?" "I picked up a DVD for Luke while I was out. Something with Mozart and sock puppets." A grin rose to my lips. "At this stage I don't think Luke can see more than ten inches beyond his face." "That explains his lack of interest. I thought maybe he preferred Beethoven.

I decided I wanted to be a musician when I saw the movie 'Amadeus' around 1987. I was five years old, so it was a good time to start piano lessons after seeing Tom Hulce who played Mozart play the harpsichord on his back with his hands crossed. Such a great movie to inspire a five-year-old.

I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, "You can like Mozart and ice hockey..." - and then I used to say "golf," but Tiger took over golf! - "and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades."

My English teacher always gave me scripts for plays, but I was into sports. My friend said there were small parts I could go up for, but the director gave me the part of Mozart, which was kind of the lead role. From then on I just loved it.

Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the most beautiful, Rossini the most brilliant, but Bach is the most comprehensive: he has said all there is to say.

I never thought I would write the way that I write for the studios now, which is like, not little novels, but be someone who literally is more like, you know, sometimes I guess we describe, we're more Salieri than Mozart.

I'm not a culture snob. So while, of course, I think the Mozart 'Requiem' or, say, Beethoven's 'Ninth' are some of the greatest works of art in the history of humankind, that's not to say the Beatles or Queen or Simon and Garfunkel aren't brilliant, beautiful, important works of art that should be sung without a sense of irony.

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

James Gandolfini was a genius. Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that. He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time... A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, 'You don't get it. You're like Mozart.'

I had this whole hippie idea of how easy raising a baby would be. How he would just eat and sleep and listen to Mozart, and I could just go on with my life the way it was. I was very wrong. It [being a mother] has taught me to be present and to live inside my body rather than in some out-there fantasy world.

You can play Mozart all you want and pretend that it gives you class, but what is class, you know? Class is a bus driver on the M103 who gets off the bus to help somebody on board even though he's tired, he's exhausted, and he's two months behind on his mortgage. That's real class.

Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.

My mum is in a mental hospital. There's a fine line between genius and insanity. Winston Churchill, Mozart, John Lennon. These people all had a touch of crazy that fuelled their brilliance. They were not locked up for it like my mum. Pft. Then again, Winston Churchill never tried to kill my dad.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

I've always been interested in exploring the concept of child prodigies. When I was younger, I wrote a story about Mozart as a child and I just always loved this idea of young people who are able to take control of their lives and bring a whole lot of change at such a young age.

The great hope is that people who wouldn't normally make films will be making them. Suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father's camera and for once the so called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever - and it will really become an art form.

We often say that psi is like musical ability: it is widely distributed in the populate, and everyone has some ability and can participate to some extent - in the same way that the most nonmusical person can learn to play a little Mozart on the piano. On the other hand, there is no substitute for innate talent, and there is no substitute for practice.

It can be a work by Mondrian, a piece of music by Schönberg or Mozart, a painting by Leonardo, Barnett Newman or also Jackson Pollock. That's beautiful to me. But also nature. A person can be beautiful as well. And beauty is also defined as 'untouched'. Indeed, that's an ideal: that we humans are untouched and therefore beautiful.

Alfred Schnittke was an important contemporary composer, and he lived in Germany, but no one here has heard of him. Everyone has heard of Mozart, and many believe that he can still be found in that little house in Salzburg, which is why people stand there in line. I think that our music and our art belong to our era. If the public doesn't show up, it must be stupid.

When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.

Along the way [Mozart] got married; fathered seven children (two of whom survived into adulthood); performed as a pianist; violinist; and conductor; maintained a successful teaching studio; wrote thousands of letters; traveled widely; attended the theater religiously; played cards, billiards, and bocce; and rode horseback for exercise. Not bad for someone portrayed as a giggling idiot in the movies.

The psychological detective story in "Equus" made Peter Shaffer's name as a playwright. But it was his next play, "Amadeus," that cemented his reputation, largely because of the movie version. Another battle of wills, it was the story of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart seen through the eyes of lesser composer Antonio Salieri.

To argue that we humans are capable of complex multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep's perception is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti.

People have an affinity towards things, and you don't know where it comes from. Mozart wrote a symphony when he was four, so it's said; the theory is maybe because his father was a conductor, it happened in vitro, and he heard the music before he was born, and by the age of four he knew how to write music.

If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.

With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos.

Skeptics squat by the road like guardians of truth, letting no one pass who doesn't come up to scratch. They never realize that they can see only what their paradigm tells them to look for. If you judge a person only by how well he plays pool, Mozart won't pass scrutiny, but the fault is in your lens.

In my spare time, I’ve been playing a lot of piano. I’m trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It’s fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing.

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.

Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight.

Opera contains music that reflects a culture of poetry and aesthetic. Spirituals are no different. What separates a spiritual for me is that I also happen to love Jesus. When I'm approaching these songs, I'm not approaching them like Mozart. I see my faith and the struggle of my ancestors and of a people seeking freedom beside what these songs are going to be in terms of their arrangement and delivery.

Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the 'Soave sia il vento' and 'Kentucky Woman.' We have different words for 'art' and 'idea' because they are two different things.

I've always been interested in exploring the concept of child prodigies. When I was younger, I wrote a story about Mozart as a child, and I just always loved this idea of young people who are able to take control of their lives and bring a whole lot of change at such a young age.

Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak.

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.

I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.

A culture that gave the world the spiritual creations of the Classical Music of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Schubert, the paintings of Michelangelo, and Raphael, Da Vinci and Rembrandt, does not need lessons from societies whose idea of spirituality is a heaven peopled with female virgins for the use of men, whose idea of heaven resembles a cosmic brothel.

Calling 'Instagram' a photo-sharing app is like calling a newspaper a letter-sharing book, or a Mozart grand era symphony a series of notes. 'Instagram' is less about the medium and more about the network.

I love the early sonatas; I love the early Mozart, period. I'm really fond of that moment when he was either emulating Haydn or Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach or anybody but himself. The moment he found himself, as conventional wisdom would have it, at the age of 18 or 19 or 20, I stop being so interested in him.