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Schubert Quotes

Browse 36 quotes about Schubert.

Schubert Quotes

“By leaving the organization of his concerts to others, Liszt sometimes fell victim to amusing errors. He once played in Marseille and included in the programme his arrangement of Schubert’s “La Truite” (“The Trout”). Owing to a printing error the piece appeared as “La Trinité,” and the unsuspecting audience sat through this bubbling music with quasi-religious reverence. When Liszt realized the mistake he got up from the piano and made an impromptu speech, asking the audience not to confuse the mysterious idea of the Trinity with Schubert’s trout, a helpful interjection which caused great hilarity.”

MusicTrinityTroutSchubertLiszt
Book:Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847
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“Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.”

MusicIdeologyIdeologiesSchubertArt TheoryCultural TheoryFranz Schubert
Author:Theodore Dalrymple
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“From the opening lines, Sleeping with Schubert is a hilarious, whimsical romp through the looking glass of a great musical mystery. The writing snaps, crackles, and pops with humor as Bonnie Marson makes Schubert a sexy, happening kind of guy who gives new meaning to our dreaming the impossible.”

GivingWritingKindDreamGuyLinesSleepImpossibleMysteryHappeningsMusicalGlassesSexyPopsOpeningSnapsGreat MusicWhimsicalThrough The Looking GlassSchubert
Author:Jonis Agee
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“When people listen to my music, I hope that they will notice that if you take a piece by a composer like Schubert, the major and the minor triad is an extermely important thing not merely as harmony, but in creating melodic lines. Schubert is always walking up and down with arpeggios on C, E, G and so forth. I am not doing anything different really, except using a different system of harmony.”

PeopleIfsImportantDifferentLinesPiecesWalkingCreatingMajorsHarmonyImportant ThingsComposerMinorsUp And DownSchubertTriads
Author:Elliott Carter
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“I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.”

WayKnownWifeMovementJokesEnjoyedNightmarePortraitsCeremonySymphonySelectMaidensOrganizerSchubertShostakovich
Author:Slavoj Žižek
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“the writer must resist this temptation [to quote] and do his best with his own tools. It would be most convenient for us musicians if, arrived at a given emotional crisis in our work, we could simply stick in a few bars of Brahms or Schubert. Indeed many composers have no hesitation in so doing. But I have never heard the practice defended; possibly because that hideous symbol of petty larceny, the inverted comma, cannot well be worked into a musical score.”

IfsWellsWould BeGivenPracticeHeardEmotionalMusicianToolsCrisisSticksMusicalBarsTemptationSymbolsScoreComposerQuotationsPettyConvenientHideousHesitationInvertedBrahmsSchubertLarceny
Book:Streaks of life
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“A culture that gave the world the spiritual creations of the Classical Music of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Schubert, the paintings of Michelangelo, and Raphael, Da Vinci and Rembrandt, does not need lessons from societies whose idea of spirituality is a heaven peopled with female virgins for the use of men, whose idea of heaven resembles a cosmic brothel.”

MenWorldNeedsDoeIdeasUseSpiritualCultureSpiritualityHeavenCreationPaintingLessonsFemaleCosmicVirginsClassical MusicWagnerRaphaelBrothelsSchubert
Book:Virgins? What Virgins?: And Other Essays
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“I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime - if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger.”

IfsThinkingWayFirstsPlayWholePiecesPerformancesLifetimeWhole LifeRichnessPianistSonatasSchubert
Author:Philip Glass
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“I've just been playing the Trout Quintet on the phonograph. Listening to the andantino makes me want to be a trout myself. You can't help rejoicing and laughing, however moved or sad you feel, when you see the springtime clouds in the sky, the budding branches, moved by the wind, in the bright early sunlight. I'm really looking forward to the spring again. In that piece of Schubert's you can positively feel and smell the breeze and hear the birds and the whole of creation shouting for joy.”

WantFeelsWholeHelpingJoyLaughingPiecesSkyCreationWindListeningSpringBirdMovedCloudsSmellBranchesRejoiceSunlightBreezeLooking ForwardPositivelySpringtimeShoutingTroutSchubertPhonograph
Author:Sophie Scholl
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“As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.”

ThinkingKnowsArtFeelingsImaginationImagineModernWalkingPureEatingHighestMusic IsSittingEtcComposerImagine ThatSchubertModern Music
Author:C. S. Lewis
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“If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either.”

IfsThinkingTryingChildrenSaidBoringAwfulNonsenseNo PointSunnySchubertHappy Music
Book:Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews
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“In his larger forms, Schubert is a wanderer. He likes to move at the edge of the precipice, and does so with the assurance of a sleepwalker. To wander is the Romantic condition; one yields to it enraptured, or is driven and plagued by the terror of finding no escape. More often than not, happiness is but the surface of despair.”

DoeMovingFormConditionsDespairFindingsEdgesTerrorSurfaceDrivenLikesWanderYieldAssurancePrecipiceWanderersSchubert
Book:Music, Sense and Nonsense: Collected Essays and Lectures
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