Thomas Beecham Quotes

Try everything once, except folk dancing and incest.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

The bagpipes sound exactly the same when you have finished as when you started

The musical equivalent of St Pancras Station.
(on Elgar)

They are quite hopeless - drooling, driveling, doleful, depressing, dropsical drips.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Without question the most unpopular medium of musical sound in the world.

Too much counterpoint; what is worse, Protestant counterpoint.

Movie music is noise ... even more painful than my sciatica.

We cannot expect you to be with us all the time, but perhaps you could be good enough to keep in touch now and again.

The grand tune is the only thing in music that the great public really understands.

Elgar's first symphony is the musical equivalent of St Pancras Railway Station.

If an opera cannot be played by an organ grinder, it's not going to achieve immortality.

I prefer Offenbach to Bach often.

What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks jumping about.

At a rehearsal I let the orchestra play as they like. At the concert I make them play as I like.

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

If I were a dictator I should make it compulsory for every member of the population between the ages of four and eighty to listen to Mozart for at least a quarter of an hour daily for the coming five years.

Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.

Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica.

Most people really don't like music - they just like the way it sounds.

A soprano in Massenet's Don Quixote complained that she had missed her entry in the aria, "because Mr. Challiapin always dies too soon." "Madam, you must be profoundly in error," said Sir Thomas, "No operatic star has yet died half soon enough for me."

As you'll never hear the thing again, my boy, why not throw in a couple of brass bands?

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

"Have you heard any Stockhausen?" Beecham was asked. "No, but I believe I have stepped in some."

All the arts in America are a gigantic racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women.

There are no woman composers, never have been and possibly never will be.

The British like any kind of music so long as it is loud.

I find brass bands have a melancholy sound. All right out of doors, of course - fifty miles away. Like bagpipes, they turn what had been a dream into a public nuisance.

In the first movement alone, I took note of six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages.

When asked whether he minded if someone smoked in a non-smoking compartment. Certainly not if you don't object if I'm sick.

No woman is worth the loss of a night's sleep.