#mozart

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

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#jewish #mozart #race #racism #shakespeare

Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end. ↗

— Emanuel Ax

#end #entire #even #family #had

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

— Lukas Foss

#genius #indeed #mozart #qualities #understand

I can't cut off an ear everyday. Do the Van Gogh here and the Mozart there. Anyway it's exhausting enough always having to check up on what one is really doing!. ↗

— Martin Kippenberger

#anyway #check #cut #doing #ear

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. ↗

— Twyla Tharp

#background #became #by the time #compositional #doing

I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends--and I from Legends created only the ordinary! ↗

— Peter Shaffer

#artistic-substance #mozart #musical-history #salieri #art

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. ↗

— Lukas Foss

#anybody #belong #boy #genius #go

I play the piano and have been playing since I was 7, mainly classical Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart. ↗

— Kiana Tom

#beethoven #chopin #classical #i #mainly

I love stuff like Mozart. ↗

— Robin Gibb

#i love #like #love #mozart #stuff