Stephen Hough Quotes

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

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

Mozart had a tremendously fertile and creative ear for a catchy tune.

Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.

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.

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

For me, Bach is like Shakespeare. He has known all and felt all. He is everything.

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.

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.

Mozart was born Mozart. Charlie Parker was born Charlie Parker.

I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.

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

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

All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.

The Beatles were great, but Beethoven and Mozart were phenomenal. Both will be remembered for centuries, but it will always be clear which were most in touch with the soul of humanity.

I think there are very few people that I would give the title of genius to, really, but Beethoven unquestionably is one of them.

Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.

Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times.

I have always reckoned myself among the greatest admirers of Mozart, and shall do so till the day of my death.

Mozart was very much an arrested adolescent.

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

Genius is a word too often tossed around in musical circles.

Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.

I'm not trying to overcome my father or fill his shoes or reach any kind of level that he did. We're talking about a Mozart of rock music.