Colin R. Davis Quotes

Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.

When Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain... I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.

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.

The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let's call it, 'collective unconscious' of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

Great musicians, you don't just hear them, you feel them. When I listen to Randy Rhoads, I feel every note. I learned a lot from him.

I think J. S. Bach's music stands among humankind's greatest accomplishments. For me, Bach's music is not only as good as music gets but also as good as it gets, period - as good as existence, reality, life, and the world.

I find myself more genuinely drawn to the essence of Beethoven in Schnabel than I ever have been by anybody.

I remember Ella Fitzgerald sort of coming into my life like a bolt of lightning - like, what is that? It was one of the purest examples of God in art that I'd ever seen.

The music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it - that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed.

The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.

If you don't have any Coltrane, 'A Love Supreme' will do it for you. It will explain everything. Even if you don't get it, it will still explain everything. That's how deep it is.

I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.

I love to dwell on the thought that the artist is next in divinity to the saint. He, like the saint, performs miracles.

Certain things in Mozart will and can never be excelled.

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

Music is one of the ways that God has of beating in on man.

If Beethoven is a prodigy of man, Bach is a miracle of God.

Mozart's music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner being and arouse a higher, intensive life.

Musical expression is never primarily national, but is personal and individual rather. It is so deep, so profound, that it goes beyond and below nationality and gives voice to the most private feeling. In music there is never exact heredity. Each man is an individual.

Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration; they have a light, and know not whence it comes, and call it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease.