Landowska Beethoven Quotes

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit
a twenty-second best. ~ Robertson Davies

I am resolved to rise superior to every obstacle. With whom need I be afraid of measuring my strength? I will take Fate by the throat. It shall not overcome me. O how beautiful it is to be alive
would that I could live a thousand times! ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

Life would be flat without music. It is the background to all I do. It speaks to the heart in its own special way like nothing else. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things. ~ Kurt Masur

Beethoven wrote in three flats a lot. That's because he moved twice. ~ Victor Borge

A Letter to Andre Breton, Originally Composed on a Leaf of Lettuce With an Ink-dipped
Carrot

On my bed, my green comforter
draped over my knees like a lumpy turtle,
I think about the Berlin Wall of years that separates us.
In my own life, the years are beginning to stack up
like a Guinness World Record's pile of pancakes,
yet I'm still searching for some kind of syrup to believe in.
In the shadows of my pink sheet, I see your face, Desnos' face,
and two clock faces staring at each other. I see a gaping wound
that ebbs rose petals, while a sweaty armpit
holds an orchestra. Beethoven, maybe.
A lover sings a capella, with the frothiness of a cappuccino.
Starbucks, maybe. There's an hourglass, too, and beneath the sands
lie untapped oil reserves. I see Dali's mustache,
Magritte's pipe, and bowling shoes, which leaves the question--
If you could time travel through a trumpet, would you find
today and tomorrow too loud? ~ Jarod Kintz

The power and magic of music lie in its intangibility and its limitlessness. It suggests images, but leaves us free to choose them and to accommodate them to our pleasure. ~ Wanda Landowska

In the country It seems as if every tree Said to me 'Holy! Holy!' Who can ever express The ecstasy of the woods! Almighty One, In the woods I am blessed. Happy every one in the woods. Every tree speaks through Thee. O God! What glory in the woodland. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

This new concept of the "finest, highest achievement of art" had no sooner entered my mind than it located the imperfect enjoyment I had had at the theater, and added to it a little of what it lacked; this made such a heady mixture that I exclaimed, "What a great artiste she is!" It may be thought I was not altogether sincere. Think, however, of so many writers who, in a moment of dissatisfaction with a piece they have just written, may read a eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or who may think of some other great artist whom they have dreamed of equaling, who hum to themselves a phrase of Beethoven for instance, comparing the sadness of it to the mood they have tried to capture in their prose, and are then so carried away by the perception of genius that they let it affect the way they read their own piece, no longer seeing it as they first saw it, but going so far as to hazard an act of faith in the value of it, by telling themselves "It's not bad you know!" without realizing that the sum total which determines their ultimate satisfaction includes the memory of Chateaubriand's brilliant pages, which they have assimilated to their own, but which, of course, they did not write. Think of all the men who go on believing in the love of a mistress in whom nothing is more flagrant than her infidelities; of all those torn between the hope of something beyond this life (such as the bereft widower who remembers a beloved wife, or the artist who indulges in dreams of posthumous fa ~ Marcel Proust

Music is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently. ~ Esa-Pekka Salonen

In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there's a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished - but more innovative - than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos - demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship - are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments. A ~ David Bayles

I visualized myself at Norma's house, stretched out on her couch, my eyes closed, and she at bthe paino playing a powerful movement from some Symphony in D major by Beethoven, by Brahms, by Sibelius, by Tschaikowsky, by anybody, by Thomas Wolfe, by Ernest Hemmingway, by William Saroyan, by Jack Kerouac, by George Apostolos, by Sebastian the Prince, by Love, by Earth, by Fire, by Water, by All, Everything, Love you and I, me myself, egotist, Earth, Fire, a mad and wild concoction of all Life, and of the all-embracing All. ~ Jack Kerouac

Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well ... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven. ~ Irwin Shaw

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian. ~ Billy Wilder

A burst of Beethoven that would have made the composer glad he was deaf erupted from her i-Phone. ~ Ian Simpson

Men are not only together when they are with each other; even the distant and the dead live with us. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

Wherever you are, I am there also. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

There's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way that it looks on the page that encourages it to be played in a certain fashion. ~ Nico Muhly

Friendship is more important than truth. ~ Wanda Landowska

I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

Nothing is more intolerable than to have admit to yourself your own errors. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

Cope's bot can string together notes that weave in and out with the power of Beethoven or the finesse of Mozart. That a machine can produce things of such beauty is threatening to many in the music community. "If you've spent a good portion of your life being in love with these dead composers and along comes some twerp who claims to have this piece of software that can move you in the same way, suddenly you're asking yourself, 'What's happened here?'" Cope says. "I'm messing with some very powerful relationships. ~ Christopher Steiner

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph. ~ E. M. Forster

Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.) So we are all reincarnations - though short-lived ones. When we die our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere - as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew. Atoms, however, go on practically forever. ~ Bill Bryson

Beethoven in c minor has come to symbolize his artistic character ... where he seems to be most impatient of any compromise. ~ Charles Rosen

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too
the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical. ~ Andrew Clements

One of my dogs is in the movie Beethoven's 2nd. ~ Greg Louganis

Nature is like a work by Bach or Beethoven, often starting with a central theme and making countless variations on it that are scattered throughout the symphony. By this criterion, it appears that strings are not fundamental concepts in nature. ~ Michio Kaku

Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world. ~ Jane Asher

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. ~ Simon Rattle

It was rumored that the length of the CD was determined by the duration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, because that was Norio Ohga's favorite piece of music, and he was the president of Sony at the time. Philips had designed a CD with an 11.5 cm diameter, but Ohga insisted that a disc must be able to hold the entire Beethoven recording. The longest recording of the symphony in Polygram's archive was 74 minutes, so the CD size was increased to 12 cm diameter to accommodate the extra data. ~ David Byrne

Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

I think that cheap music often does make you dream more than more serious music, whether that's serious music by Beethoven or Miles Davis or Pink Floyd ... if the Floyd ever did serious music, which I seriously doubt. ~ Jonathan Meades

I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too. ~ Dave Smalley

For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different. ~ Gustavo Dudamel

Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.
(Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.)
[Said on his deathbed] ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven