Charles Rosen Quotes
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Even Stravinsky does not evoke the same public affection as Verdi.
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The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed.
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The musical language which made the classical style possible is that of tonality, which was not a massive, immobile system but a living, gradually changing language from its beginning. It had reached a new and important turning point just before the style of Haydn and Mozart took shape.
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The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the sonority in different ways.
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Technical display in Chopin, after the early works, is transmuted into tone color or dramatic gesture-we may say, to accept the prejudices of Chopin's own generation, that it has been ennobled. This is the source of much of the poetry in Chopin's music: it comes from the transformation of the vulgar into something aristocratic.
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The creation of a classical style was not so much the achievement of an ideal as the reconciliation of conflicting ideals-the striking of an optimum balance between them.
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Chopin is the true inventor of the concert etude, at least in the sense of being the first to give it complete artistic form-a form in which musical substance and technical difficulty coincide.
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This is the true paradox of Chopin: he is most original in his use of the most fundamental and traditional technique. That is what made him at the same time the most conservative and the most radical composer of his generation.
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It is above all through landscape that music joins Romantic art and literature.
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Understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it.
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Battle Creek has such a rich history of entrepreneurs and invention, and it seems some of that spirit had died down. I'd like to see it back.
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The buffoonery of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart is only an exaggeration of an essential quality of the classical style. This style was, in its origins, basically a comic one.
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Folk music is always considered a good thing. There is a catch, however: it has to be 'real' folk music, anonymous, evoking not an individual but a communal personality, expressive of the soil.
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We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species.
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For Mendelssohn, Beethoven was the new point of departure, and a German composer could not afford to ignore him, as Chopin and Verdi were able to do.
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Schumann's humor is rarely either witty or light: the unrealizable musical structure, the musical motto hidden and partly inaudible, must have stirred his musical fantasy.
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Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seem to be beside the point-even when the attribution is authoritative, even when it is made by the composer himself.
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Schumann is the most representative musical figure of central European Romanticism as much because of his limitations as because of his genius: in his finest works, indeed, he exploited these limitations in such a way that they gave a force to his genius that no other contemporary could attain.
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None of Chopin's contemporaries could rival him for the variety and effectiveness of his treatment of the return.
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The relation of the performance of music to sound is complex and ambiguous: this is what makes possible Mark Twain's joke that Wagner is better than he sounds.