Beethoven Quotations

It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.

The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let's call it, 'collective unconscious' of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.

I free-form it, rock n' roll it. I'm a creature of risk, so I don't know how I'm going to explore a Beethoven symphony until I'm doing it.

I'm trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It's fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing.

I believe so, but at first he must know. He must know in which spirit Beethoven has composed this piece. He must try to study that. And he must find out in which station of life of Beethoven he did.

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.

In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life.

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

Mozart, Beethoven - how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.

I grew up listening to Beethoven and old jazz singers like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Anita O'Day. But those were, like, the only women I listened to - I hated women pop singers.

I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

Had Beethoven been able to carry out all his plans to fruition, then, for example, today we would have his opera Macbeth, a Faust, and many others. He would have contracted himself to write a whole series of operas.

I think everyone thinks Beethoven was very anti-social, but I don't think he was.

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.

Why does Beethoven appeal and continue to appeal? Other than the obvious (his having written great music), Beethoven communicates a credo so effectively that the listener finds the courage he needs to reaffirm his own belief in the purpose of life. Beethoven stiffens the fiber of our commitment in a language that is beauty itself, in a statement as open as a Greek temple. Friend Beethoven is the one friend we shall always have.

While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets.

With the Beethoven sonata project, the emphasis was principally on the music, although Schnabel was considered its greatest exponent.

When I was really little, I wanted to be like Schroeder from the Peanuts comics. There was something about that Beethoven he'd play that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

You look at Beethoven's sketch book and he's working things out, trying this, trying that. Mozart didn't do that. He simply wrote it out. Beethoven did not have the same abilities that Mozart had. And you know how much Beethoven means to us. When you listen to the Ninth Symphony, it's one of the greatest accomplishments of all mankind, artistically certainly. But he shuddered when he thought of the shadow Mozart cast over music and he felt pressure, just like Brahms felt the pressure Beethoven's Ninth put on symphonic writing.

Every day before school, I would bang away on Czerny, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart-and throw in a little Jerry Lee Lewis when I thought no one was around to correct me.

There's always blood on the carpet when I play Beethoven at the piano. I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!

As a small boy I had read about Beethoven in the Book of Knowledge, now I was listening enraptured to his sonatas and symphonies.

Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.

You played very well but I would like you to take the Fourth Sonata of Beethoven and figure it out for yourself.

This is an amazing find. The manuscript was only known from a brief description in a catalogue in 1890 and it has never before been seen or described by Beethoven scholars. Its rediscovery will allow a complete reassessment of this extraordinary music. Sotheby's has been very fortunate in selling a large number of Beethoven manuscripts in recent years, including a previously unknown composition, but this is even more interesting. It is a completely lost autograph of a major work and such a visually exciting and extraordinary manuscript.

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

In all the Beethoven literature, it's described as lost. There are lots of alterations, changes, revisions that no one has ever seen.

If you look back, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven were mixing music and humor all the time.

I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.

Beethoven saw physician after physician in search of a cure for his physical ailments. He suffered from bad digestion, chronic abdominal pain, irritability and depression.

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

The manuscript was only known from a brief description in a catalogue in 1890 and it has never before been seen or described by Beethoven scholars.

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.