Richard Strauss Quotes

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

When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.

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.

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

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

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.

Einstein was very attracted to Mozart. There's a mathematical, classical structure to the music, and I think he identified with that very strongly. I think there also is a connection between being a genius and a polymath.

When I think of Boris Diaw, I think of Beethoven in the age of the romantics

Mozart starved, but you allow Thalberg and Liszt make tons of gold: Of course, you may think that someone immortal cannot die of hunger

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth!

Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.

Mendelssohn I consider the first musician of the day; I doff my hat to him as my superior. He plays with everything, especially with the grouping of the instruments in the orchestra, but with such ease, delicacy and art, with such mastery throughout.

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy - and it made me feel something. That's when I realized music was inside me.

If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.

A lot of people may not know how competitive it is to play classical music, because when you think about it, the music that you're playing is music that's been here for years. And all you're trying to do is improve upon it when you play.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.

There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.

Beethoven's symphonies are not 'relaxing.' They are the most exciting things that have ever been created by a human being.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

The 'Mozart Symphony No. 27' is an early composition. I find it charming.

Looking back on it now, I felt that I was blessed much like the masters, I guess - the guys who wrote the concertos.