Quotes About Verdi

It has to be able to play at the maximum expression and communication in every style, and the only way you can do that is - like Verdi said - working with a file, every day, little by little, until the orchestra's collective qualities emerge.

This is my Italy, she thought. The power and beauty of the antiquities, the detailed frescos, the imposing statuaries carved of milk white granite, Don Martinelli's hammered gold chalice, the glorious tones of the music, the Italy of Puccini and Verdi, Caruso and Toscanini, not the Italy of the shattered spirits in Hoboken and the drunken, desperate Anna Buffa. This was the Italy that fed her soul, where hope was restored and broken hearts were mended in the hands of great artists.

Othello's suicide is profoundly moving; but it does not make us feel suicidal. What moves us is the way in which Shakespeare (and Verdi) made sense out of tragedy by making it part of an artistic whole. As Nietzsche realized, even tragedy is an affirmation of life.

It has to be able to play at the maximum expression and communication in every style, and the only way you can do that is - like Verdi said - working with a file, every day, little by little, until the orchestra's collective qualities emerge.

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.

But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered;

I'll write three operas - one for Verdi, one for Puccini, and one for Bellini.

I love music, especially classical like Verdi; it's a great way to relax.

Verdi's music did little to comfort him, and he left the theatre and walked homeward, without knowing his way, through the torturous, tragic streets of Rome, where heavier sorrows than his had been carried under the stars.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

So you're a real person! I always thought you were a legendary figure, like unicorns or Giuseppe Verdi.

But we can't expect every great artist to have a great soul. If more of them were like Verdi, we could read artists' biographies for uplift; but we would be so repelled by Wagner that we would forget to listen, or by Picasso that we would forget to look.