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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• 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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• 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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• But, on the other hand, if Schubert were alive today, he would find even richer fields to plow.

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

  Hands, Live For Today, Alive

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• I've just been playing the Trout Quintet on the phonograph. Listening to the andantino makes me want to be a trout myself. You can't help rejoicing and laughing, however moved or sad you feel, when you see the springtime clouds in the sky, the budding branches, moved by the wind, in the bright early sunlight. I'm really looking forward to the spring again. In that piece of Schubert's you can positively feel and smell the breeze and hear the birds and the whole of creation shouting for joy.

  Sophie Scholl

  Spring, Clouds, Wind

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• Brahms believed that there was no need to publish absolutely everything that Schubert ever wrote.

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

  Needs, Brahms, Publish

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• I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived.... His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America's Schubert.

  George Gershwin

  Beautiful, Song, Believe

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• I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

  Anne Stevenson

  Literature, Loyal, Austen

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• With Schubert, a lot of the melodies are very simple, but he's in this groove. He's in touch with his heart.

  Tom Wopat

  Heart, Simple, Groove

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• If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either.

  Edward Gorey

  Children, Thinking, Trying

  Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin

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• I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime - if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger.

  Philip Glass

  Thinking, Play, Pieces

  "Ira Glass Interviews His Cousin, Composer Philip Glass". www.wbur.org. September 21, 1999.

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• My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them.

  James Brown

  Two, Written

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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