#mozart

In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can. ↗

— Maurice Baring

#contrast #does #genius #mozart #must

There is a strange kind of human being in whom there is an eternal struggle between body and soul, animal and god, for dominance. In all great men this mixture is striking, and in none more so than in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. ↗

— Alfred Einstein

#animal #being #between #body #dominance

It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years. ↗

— Tom Lehrer

#been #dead #had #mozart #sobering

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. ↗

— Sean Lennon

#any #did #father #fill #his

Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration. ↗

— Ernest Newman

#bach #beethoven #day #down #hand

And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage. ↗

— Tony Randall

#because #beethoven #crime #everybody #going

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#mozart #opera #shakespeare #verdi #wagner

Mozart, who was buried in a pauper’s grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success. ↗

— Eleanor Roosevelt

#life

For all his claims to be just a propagandist, [Bernard Shaw's] writing has an effect nearer to that of music than most of those who have claimed to be writing "dramas of feeling." His plays are a joy to watch, not because they purport to deal with social and political problems, but because they are such wonderful displays of conspicuous waste; the conversational energy displayed by his characters is so far in excess of what their situation requires that, if it were to be devoted to practical action, it would wreck the world in five minutes. The Mozart of English letters he is not – the music of the Marble Statue is beyond him – the Rossini, yes. He has all the brio, humor, cruel clarity and virtuosity of that master of opera buffa. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#music #opera #rossini #shaw #music

Le Requiem de Mozart. Un souffle de l'au-delà y plane. Comment croire, après une pareille audition, que l'univers n'ait aucun sens? Il faut qu'il en ait un. Que tant de sublime se résolve dans le néant, le coeur, aussi bien que l'entendement, refuse de l'admettre. Quelque chose doit exister quelque part, un brin de réalité doit être contenu dans ce monde. Ivresse du possible qui rachète la vie. Craignons le retombement et le retour du savoir amer... ↗

— Emil Cioran

#mozart #music #music