39 quotes
Visual delight, sentiment, and exploration become one in the new appreciation of landscape and Nature.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
None of Chopin's contemporaries could rival him for the variety and effectiveness of his treatment of the return.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
It is above all through landscape that music joins Romantic art and literature.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
Understanding music simply means not being irritated or puzzled by it.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
Schumann's humor is rarely either witty or light: the unrealizable musical structure, the musical motto hidden and partly inaudible, must have stirred his musical fantasy.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
Liszt has never needed revival; his music has always been an important part of the concert repertoire. Nevertheless, he has appeared to need rehabilitation.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
Folk music is always considered a good thing. There is a catch, however: it has to be "real" folk music, anonymous, evoking not an individual but a communal personality, expressive of the soil.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
The eventual survival of the tradition is ultimately not at stake.
Meyerbeer's approach to opera may seem cynical. His music is not, like Donizetti's, an immediate expression of the sentiments of his characters but a calculated manipulation of the audience.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
Our freedom is hemmed in on every side. We must be grateful for what remains.
The relation of the performance of music to sound is complex and ambiguous: this is what makes possible Mark Twain's joke that Wagner is better than he sounds.
Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002)
Chopin's exquisite ear saved him from the ugly repetition of thick chords in the bass that frequently disfigure the work of Mendelssohn, Weber, and Hummel—and even of Field.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
The piano is the only keyboard instrument in which one can grandly vary the effects of the harmonics or overtones of a chord at will by balancing the sonority in different ways.
Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002)
Chopin is the true inventor of the concert etude, at least in the sense of being the first to give it complete artistic form—a form in which musical substance and technical difficulty coincide.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
Critical evaluation was transformed into understanding, and criticism became not an act of judgment but of comprehension.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species.
The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994)
For Mendelssohn, Beethoven was the new point of departure, and a German composer could not afford to ignore him, as Chopin and Verdi were able to do.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
The buffoonery of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart is only an exaggeration of an essential quality of the classical style. This style was, in its origins, basically a comic one.
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1997)
The most signal triumphs of the Romantic portrayal of memory are not those which recall past happiness, but remembrances of those moments when future happiness still seemed possible, when hopes were not yet frustrated.
The Romantic Generation (1995)
Sonata form could not be defined until it was dead. Czerny claimed with pride around 1840 that he was the first to describe it, but then it was already part of history.
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1997)