Quotes from Jan Swafford

Perhaps an eternal law of art is that, for everything discovered, something of value is forgotten.

There's something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.

What elevates one and not another to the level of genius is not only talent and ambition and luck, but a gift for turning everything to the purpose. ... Perhaps that is a common element in the story of genius: beyond talent and ambition and luck, in some degree you have to be forcibly booted out of everyday life and everyday goals. In any case, it was like that with Brahms. The fulfillment of love was denied him so that other things might take wing.

Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown.

Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown." Maria van Beethoven (Beethoven's mom)

The situation is desperate," runs an old Viennese saying, "but not serious.

Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop.

Art is free," he said, "and is not to be diminished by any chains of craftsmanship.

The little Prelude in C Major that starts the set is one of Bach's most famous and beloved pieces (it was reportedly a favorite of his, too), yet what appears to be a simple rippling up and down on chords disguises a complex interweaving of melodies.

locking the little scamp in the basement.

concert. It was a benefit for the string-playing

ANOTHER PRODUCT OF THE SPRING WAS THE QUINTET IN E-FLAT FOR Piano and Winds, K. 452.

In its dream of the triumph of reason and science, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century failed in its hope of sweeping away old legends and superstitions like these—partly because the next generation, the Romantics, would condemn the reign of reason and embrace the ancient, the wild and mysterious, the mingling of fear and awe they called the sublime. In

ONE CRITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS THAT ART escaped from religion and into the larger world.

munificence.

We tend to listen to Mozart with ears trained by Beethoven, and that's not the best way to listen to Mozart.

He served humankind but never understood people, and though he yearned with all his heart for love and companionship, year after year he could bear humanity less and less in the flesh. His

One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if ever, by the leaper. Life seems to me an improvisation .

Schubert had been one of the first composers to groan, "Who can do anything after Beethoven?