Thomas Beecham Quotes

If you look back, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven were mixing music and humor all the time.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Mendelssohn never wrote any Water Music. However, he wrote the Scotch Symphony, which is even better, or at least stronger.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

I'm very proud of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I love Shostakovich. We were good friends.

I've got that Beethoven energy, that Stravinsky energy. And it's all a gift from the Creator.

I want to take the great tradition of the orchestra within me, to take what the orchestra offers.

I'm a big Beethoven fan, and you'll struggle to find a three-minute song on any of his stuff.

I was in a choir at school and we were part of the BBC Proms back in around 2002.

My grandmother got me recordings of the 'Goldberg Variations,' in addition to the 'Brandenburg Concertos,' the Mozart string quartets and Beethoven's 'Seventh Symphony.'

Mozart combined high formality and playfulness that delights as no other composition in any other medium does.

Soccer and sports are entertainment ... You can't call Beethoven's 9th Symphony or a work of Shakespeare 'entertainment.' It's not 'entertainment.' It's culture.

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.

Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.

Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah

Did Wagner really accomplish the first step towards the kitschy 'fetishization' of music that reaches its apogee in classical Hollywood?

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

[Peter] Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" was my first go-to song in terms of getting into the zone and getting ready and then I quickly gravitated to rock and roll music in the mid-'60s with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Rolling Stones, Carlos Santana. So many of them are still around and still going strong. I go out to see them all the time.

To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

Perhaps Bach and Beethoven are strange bedfellows for Mickey Mouse, but it's all been a lot of fun.