Frederic Chopin Quotes

When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'

The pedal is the soul of the piano.

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.

When a pianist sits down and does a virtuoso performance he is in a technical sense transmitting more information to a machine than any other human activity involving machinery allows.

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.

Yesterday I was playing Beethoven's fifth, because I love that.

Well, I don't know any piece by heart, but Mozart goes something like this... What do you think?

I am so happy that I didn't go to school and I didn't have anyone to tell me how to position my fingers on the piano correctly. And what you do with music and what is the correct way to write it and what is not the correct way to write it.

I just sit down at the piano and rattle it off.

The piano is the instrument I can play the most.

I started out with piano when I was little. That, for songwriting, is my favorite instrument.

One of the features of being a piano player is playing as an accompanist for other people.

I know what my taste is, and I do like my touch on the piano.

I play the piano.

Piano playing consists of common sense, heart and technical resources. All three should be equally developed. Without common sense you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine. The profession does have its hazards.

I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.

Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully.

Playing a concerto with Zubin is like being surrounded by a well-loved, cashmere-lined silk glove.

The song is just the given. It's how you cover it that matters.

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

Other people singing my songs is something that I've never been casual about. I've always been very touched by it and I always go into immediate critical suspension.

You really can't be a good artist if you can't say what you really feel. And people may be offended, but, you know, that's how you feel, and that is your right, and that is your gift as well.

An artist doesn't necessarily have deeper feelings than other people, but he can express these feelings. He is like everyone else-only more so! He speaks with a Formal Sigh.

I have a good friend, Rudolf Serkin, the pianist, a very sensitive man. I was talking to him one day backstage after a concert and I told him that I thought he had played particularly sensitively that day. I said, "You know, many pianists are brilliant, they strike the keys so well, but somehow you are different." "Ah," he said, "I don't think you should ever strike a key. You should pull the keys with your fingers."