Quotes

[Joy]

Originally posted by Amalie:

Opposition to Adultery.

"It is one of my chief principles never to be in any other relationship than that of friendship with the wife of another man.
For I should not wish by forming any other kind of relationship to fill my heart with distrust of that woman who some day will perhaps share my fate - and thus my own action to destroy the lovliest and purist relationship"


~ Beethoven ~

"To me the highest thing, after God, is my honour."

July 26, 1822, to the publisher Peters, in Leipzig


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[Joy]

From Opus 84 #2 "Joyful and Sorrowful"

Joyful And sorrowful,
Thoughtful;
Longing
And anxious
In constant anguish;
Skyhigh rejoicing
despairing to death;
Happy alone
Is the soul that loves.



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[Amalie]

"Provided one can feel the music, one can make the pianoforte sing"

** Beethoven **

[Amalie]

Beethoven, angry with his reviewers in 1801, wrote to Breitkopf & Hartel to complain, asking them to -

"advise your critics to be more circumspect and intelligent, particularly with regard to the productions of your authors. For many a one may become dispirited who otherwise might have risen to higher things.
For myself, far be it from me to think that I have attained such a degree of perfection as to be beyond criticism.
The outcry of your critics against me was humiliating. Yet when I began to compare myself to other composers, I could hardly bring myself to pay attention to it all. Still I remained quiet, and said to myself, "they do not know anything about music". And I had all the more reason for being quiet when I saw how certain people were being praised to the skies who here (in Vienna) have little standing.

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Mock serious self deprecation - I think!

Beethoven, of course, did attain a degree of perfection, so as to be beyond criticism, and surely even Beethoven's early youthful work put him in a different class to his contemporaries.
Far from remaining quiet, - 'B' was rarely quiet about anything.
Inferiors being praised to the skies, while he was being humbled would have tested his wrath to breaking point! I would imagine


[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited August 14, 2003).]

[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited August 21, 2003).]

[spaceray]

...But we know of a blind seer.Tiresias, to whom the phenomenal world was closed,but who, with inward vision, saw the basis of all phenomena,- and the deaf musician who listens to his inner harmonies undisturbed by the noise of life,who speaks from the depths to a world that has nothing more to say to him- now resembles the seer.
From "Beethoven" by Richard Wagner 1870

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Amalie:
Beethoven, angry with his reviewers in 1801, wrote to Breitkopf & Hartel to complain, asking them to -

"advise your critics to be more circumspect and intelligent, particularly with regard to the productions of your authors. For many a one may become dispirited who otherwise might have risen to higher things.
For myself, far be it from me to think that I have attained such a degree of perfection as to be beyond criticism.
The outcry of your critics against me was humiliating. Yet when I began to compare myself to other composers, I could hardly bring myself to pay attention to it all. Still I remained quiet, and said to myself, "they do not know anything about music". And I had all the more reason for being quiet when I saw how certain people were being praised to the skies who here (in Vienna) have little standing.

************************


Mock serious self deprecation - I think!

Beethoven, of course, did attain a degree of perfection, so as to be beyond criticism, and surely even Beethoven's early youthful work put him in a different class to his contemporaries.
Far from remaining quiet, - 'B' was rarely quiet about anything.
Inferiors being praised to the skies, while he was being humbled would have tested his wrath to breaking point! I would imagine

[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited August 21, 2003).]

"It has always been known that the greatest pianoforte players were also the greatest composers; but how did they play? Not like the pianists of today who prance up and down the keyboard with passages in which they have exercised themselves, - putsch, putsch, putsch! What does this mean? Nothing!.
When the true pianoforte virtuosi played it was always something homogeneous, an entity; it could be transcribed and then it appeared as a well-thought-out work. That is pianoforte playing; the other is nothing!"


( Beethoven, in a conversation book with Tomaschek, October 1814.)

[Amalie]

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down and rubbed his name off the piano"
****
-(Bob Hope, on comedian Phyliss Dyller)





[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 02, 2003).]

[Joy]

Originally posted by Amalie:

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down and rubbed his name off the piano"
****
-(Bob Hope, on comedian Phyliss Dyller)





[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 02, 2003).]

Ha Ha!! Bob Hope, the King of one liners!! Did you know though that Phyllis Diller was a classical pianist. She attended the Juliard School and in the early 1960's before she became a 'serious' comedianne she traveled the country performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto #1. (Among other compositions). I got to see some excerpts from her Beethoven performance and she was very good indeed.

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[This message has been edited by Joy (edited September 03, 2003).]

[Joy]

"Whoever tells a lie is not pure of heart, and such a person can not cook a clean soup."

To Mme. Streicher in 1817, after having dismissed an otherwise good housekeeper because she had told a falsehood to spare his feelings.

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[Joy]

"Why so many dished? Man is certainly very little higher than the other animals if his chief delights are those of the table."

Reported by J.A. Stumpff, in the 'Harmonicon' of 1824. He dined with Beethoven in Baden.

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[Joy]

“Tender as Thou lives, So thou died.
Too holy for sorrows!
No eye can weep at the homecoming of a heavenly soul.”
Elegiac Song - Opus 118 “Tender as Thou Lives" 1814.

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[spaceray]

"I am not in the habit of rewriting my compositions. I never did it because I am profoundly convinced that every change of detail changes the character of the whole"
Beethoven

[Joy]

“Music puts us in mind of exactly all that which is to us closed off, stiff, doubtful, confused, cumbersome, and wants to be clarified and reconciled; that which other languages, art forms, and influences from life attempt in vain. The more a man guards his life form rigidity through freedom of feeling, the more he sees all existence filled with the poetry of life, the better he will understand music. These feelings, however, should not be thought of as a text; they should not be demanded of the artist, nor searched for in ourselves, because man feels without reflection intervening.”
Wolfgang Frohlich August 1827

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