Thomas Beecham Quotes

A great song is a great song.

More people are listening to opera, and I'm happy - everybody must be given that opportunity.

Michael Berkeley's 'Sonata' is very - what can you say - melodious.

The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in the boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by this sweet storm of song.

I'm attached to the beat. The beat speaks words. I love music.

I have sung all kinds of songs - be it ghazals, qawwalis, romantic numbers or peppy numbers.

People tend to put too much focus on the lyrics. It's not the be-all and end-all of our songs.

As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.

There is always space for good music.

Music should resonate with people on an emotional level. That's one of the criterions I use for an idea. Does it speak simply and directly without obfuscation and without being unnecessarily complex or obscure?

I've always had good songs, it's the great songs that are difficult to find.

Language' is, I think, my favorite song that I've ever written.

There are no electric guitars. 'Hunchback' has arias; it's operatic.

A singer knows how he wants the song to go, and a writer visualizes how he wants the song to go.

You can't get down and dirty at the opera.

I'm never trying to make something esoteric; it just happens.

We're not building a nuclear reactor here. We're not drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean with no plan in case something goes wrong. This is making music, this is melodious air and people can hear what goes into it.

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

I learned so much about music by playing this little, miniature songwriting machine [ukulele], especially about melody. The motto is less strings more melody.

Everyone understands cards and relates to it. They have them in their homes and in their hands, so it makes them very accessible.

I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

When you play Mozart, it's so clean, it's so simple. It's the body naked.

Music is the perfect type of art.

I have reared a memorial more enduring than brass, and loftier than the regal structure of the pyramids, which neither the corroding shower nor the powerless north wind can destroy; no, not even unending years nor the flight of time itself. I shall not entirely die. The greater part of me shall escape oblivion.