Quotes About Beethoven

It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.

The last song recorded for Abbey Road was Lennon's BECAUSE - a three-part harmony in C sharp minor inspired by hearing Yoko Ono play the Adagio sostenuto of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14, Op. 27 No. 2 (Moonlight).

I blinked as I heard chamber music coming from the other room. "What are you listening to?" "I picked up a DVD for Luke while I was out. Something with Mozart and sock puppets." A grin rose to my lips. "At this stage I don't think Luke can see more than ten inches beyond his face." "That explains his lack of interest. I thought maybe he preferred Beethoven." -Ella & Jack

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

The Beethoven Experience provided the opportunity to solidify the relationship between the Orchestra and me, the Orchestra and me and the public, between all of us and the city of New York, because Beethoven after all is a really amazing point of reference.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Not "brook" [in German: Bach], but "sea" should he [Johann Sebastian Bach] be called because of his infinite, inexhaustible richness in tone combinations and harmonies. (Nicht Bach! Meer sollte er heissen: wegen seines unendlichen, unerschoepflichen Reichtums an Tonkombinationen und Harmonien.)

World, do you know your creator? Seek him in the heavens Above the stars must He dwell.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery.

but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.

The music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann were amongst his favourites.

It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it.

Embrace paradox. Look for patterns. Beethoven holds the key but doesn't know it yet. Hiding inside your Shangri-La you might find the Gates of Hell

this Golden Age in Germany music, too, had become a great art, with such immortal names as Mozart, Gluck, Haydn, and Beethoven; and the period of great orchestration also had commenced.[1]

Joy through suffering: this phrase (extracted from one of Beethoven's letters, where it actually referred to an uncomfortable coach journey) became the central motto of the Beethoven cult [..].

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.

He was hungry for the warmth of another human being, and I was hungry for his warmth. And in different ways, we were both hungry for our mothers, he for the pleasant memories that were either true or a trick of his imagination, I for the memories that were best forgotten but ultimately forgiven. We were all flawed. I'd never met anyone who made me understand and accept that better than Beethoven.