Schubert Quotes

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner

Morning, Men, Play

Language and Silence preface (1967)

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In his larger forms, Schubert is a wanderer. He likes to move at the edge of the precipice, and does so with the assurance of a sleepwalker. To wander is the Romantic condition; one yields to it enraptured, or is driven and plagued by the terror of finding no escape. More often than not, happiness is but the surface of despair.

Alfred Brendel

Moving, Yield, Despair

Alfred Brendel (2015). “Music, Sense and Nonsense: Collected Essays and Lectures”, p.167, Biteback Publishing

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Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully.

Frederic Chopin

Voice, Piano, Done

"Famous Pianists on Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann" by G. Henle Verlag, 2010.

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That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging.

Haruki Murakami

Eye, Perfect, Listening

FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Jan 07, 2015

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The reason why Schubert is celebrated so much today, lies rather in the fact that there has been nobody else like him - not before him, not after him.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Lying, Facts, Reason Why

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In my study I can lay my hand on the Bible in the pitch dark. All truly inspired ideas come from God. The powers from which all truly great composers like Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven drew their inspirations is the same power that enabled Jesus to do his miracles.

Johannes Brahms

Jesus, Inspiration, Dark

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I never want projects to be finished; I have always believed in unfinished work. I got that from Schubert, you know, the 'Unfinished Symphony.'

Yoko Ono

Unfinished Work, Symphony, Want

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A culture that gave the world the spiritual creations of the Classical Music of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Schubert, the paintings of Michelangelo, and Raphael, Da Vinci and Rembrandt, does not need lessons from societies whose idea of spirituality is a heaven peopled with female virgins for the use of men, whose idea of heaven resembles a cosmic brothel.

Ibn Warraq

Spiritual, Men, Ideas

Ibn Warraq (2010). “Virgins? What Virgins?: And Other Essays”

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In Romanticism, the main determinant is the mood, the atmosphere. And in that regard, you could also describe Schubert as a Romantic.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Romantic, Atmosphere, Mood

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I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

Colm Toibin

Song, Morning, Writing

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When people listen to my music, I hope that they will notice that if you take a piece by a composer like Schubert, the major and the minor triad is an extermely important thing not merely as harmony, but in creating melodic lines. Schubert is always walking up and down with arpeggios on C, E, G and so forth. I am not doing anything different really, except using a different system of harmony.

Elliott Carter

Creating, People, Important

Interview with Joel Bons, as quoted in notes for album "Elliott Carter: Homages and Dedications" (CD booklet, p. 17), 2003.

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I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

Slavoj Žižek

Symphony, Wife, Way

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At first I thought I should be a second Beethoven; presently I found that to be another Schubert would be good; then gradually, satisfied with less and less, I resigned to be a Humperdinck.

Engelbert Humperdinck

Self Esteem, Firsts, Would Be

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The cause of freedom, in music as elsewhere, is now very nearly triumphant; but at a time when its adversaries were many and powerful, we can hardly imagine the sacred bridge of liberty kept by a more stalwart trio than Schubert the Armorer, Chopin the Refiner, and Liszt the Thunderer.

Hugh Reginald Haweis

Music, Powerful, Bridges

Hugh Reginald Haweis (1873). “Music and Morals”, p.298, London : Strahan

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the writer must resist this temptation [to quote] and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score.

Ethel Smyth

Emotional, Practice, Temptation

Ethel Smyth (1922). “Streaks of life”

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A mathematician will recognise Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi or Helmholtz after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognise, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert.

Ludwig Boltzmann

Reading, Musician, Bars

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It's easier to interest a conservative audience in pushing the musical boundaries than to involve a young audience used to very noisy, assertive music in something like Schubert or Bach because the further back you go, the less bells and whistles there are.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Musical, Bells, Pushing

"The Superconductor: SF Symphony’s Michael Tilson Thomas (Condensed Version)". Interview with Clara Jeffery, www.motherjones.com. March/April 2010.

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Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.

Martin Walser

Atheist, Missing, Worldly Life

"We Cannot Retreat To Atheism". Interview with Alexander Görlach, www.theeuropean-magazine.com. September 3, 2012.

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Mozart is a garden, Schubert is a forest in light and shade, but Beethoven is a mountain range.

Artur Schnabel

Garden, Mountain Ranges, Light

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From the opening lines, Sleeping with Schubert is a hilarious, whimsical romp through the looking glass of a great musical mystery. The writing snaps, crackles, and pops with humor as Bonnie Marson makes Schubert a sexy, happening kind of guy who gives new meaning to our dreaming the impossible.

Jonis Agee

Sexy, Dream, Sleep

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I bring my classical training - some of it, but not all of it - and also my background and culture, to spirituals. And I try to leave room for that unpredictable factor, where the feeling of the song is allowed to come through. The same ethos can be applied to singing Mozart, or Schubert, or Bach. It's not just about what's on the page.

Kathleen Battle

Song, Ethos, Feelings

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Salieri was a pupil of Gluck. He was born in Italy in 1750 and died in Vienna in 1825. He left Italy when he was 16 and spent most of his life in Vienna. He's the key composer between classic music and romantic music. Beethoven was the beginning of romantic music, and he was the teacher of Beethoven and Schubert.

Cecilia Bartoli

Teacher, Keys, Romantic Music

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But it wasn't just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.

Isabelle Huppert

Piano, Soul, Way

"Isabelle Huppert (I)". Interview with Christopher Cook, www.theguardian.com. November 11, 2001.

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As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

C. S. Lewis

Art, Thinking, Imagination

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Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

Carson McCullers

Morning, Sunday, Musical

Carson McCullers (1998). “Clock Without Hands”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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