"For the glory of the most high God alone,
And for my neighbour to learn from." ~Johann Sebastian Bach, epigraph to Little Organ Book, 1717

"That will make the ladies scream." ~Joseph Haydn, speaking of the 'surprise' in the 'Surprise' Symphony No.94; quoted in A Gyrowetz, Memoirs, 1848

"If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music." ~Gustav Mahler

"Ever since I began to compose, I have remained true to my starting principle: not to write a page because no matter what public, or what pretty girl wanted it to be thus or thus; but to write solely as I myself thought best, and as it gave me pleasure." ~Felix Mendelssohn, 1843

"The artist must yield himself to his own inspiration... I should compose with utter confidence a subject that set my musical blood going, even though it were condemned by all other artists as anti-musical." ~Giuseppe Verdi, letter, 1854

"Stupid criticism and still more stupid praise." ~Giuseppe Verdi, speaking of the press notices of Aida

"Musical ideas sprang to my mind like a flight of butterflies, and all I had to do was to stretch out my hand to catch them." ~Gounod, speaking of his period in Provence, 1863, quoted in J Harding, Gounod (1973)

"Where other people keep diaries in which they record their momentary feelings, etc, Schubert simply kept sheets of music by him and confided his changing moods to them; and his soul being steeped in music, he put down notes when another man would resort to words." ~Robert Schumann, letter to to Friedrich Wieck, 1829; quoted in Gal, The Musician's World (1965)

"Such is the spell of of your emotional world that it very nearly blinds us to the greatness of your craftsmanship." ~Franz Liszt, referring to Franz Schubert

"Schumann is the composer of childhood... both because he created a children's imaginative world and because children learn some of their first music in his marvelous piano albums." Igor Stravinsky, Themes and Conclusions (1972)

"O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, how infinitely many inspiring suggestions of a finer, better life have you left in our souls!" ~Franz Schubert, Diary, 1816

"The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists." ~Arthur Schnabel

"The classical composer par excellence of the present day, who free from any provincialism of expression or national dialect... writes for the whole world and for all time—a giant, lofty and unapproachable—Johannes Brahms." ~Edward Elgar, 1886

"He is the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb." ~Ludwig van Beethoven, referring to Handel, quoted in Percy M Young, Handel(1947)

"Handel is so great and so simple that no one but a professional musician is unable to understand him." ~Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

"Handel understands effect better than any of us—when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt." ~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, quoted in Percy M Young, Handel (1947)

"I want to do nothing chic, I want to have ideas before beginning a piece." ~Bizet, letter to Charles Gounod, 1858

"A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out." ~Ernest Newman

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." ~Igor Stravinsky

"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own." ~Oscar Wilde, 1891

"I began to compose and arrange as a young man. I wanted to create a repertory for myself, to be able to express through my medium, the violin, a great deal of beautiful music that had first to be adapted for the instrument. What I composed and arranged was for my own use, reflected my own musical tastes and preferences. In fact, it was not till years after that I even thought of publishing the pieces I had composed and arranged. For I was very diffident as to the outcome of such a step. I have never written anything with the commercial idea of making it 'playable.' And I have always felt that anything done in a cold-blooded way for purely mercenary considerations somehow cannot be good. It cannot represent an artist's best." ~Fritz Kreisler

"It would be vain to try to put into words that immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me directly [when] a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a definite form." ~Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky

"Mozart is sunshine." ~Antonin Dvorak, quoted in Otakar Sourek (ed.), Antonin Dvorak: Letters and Reminiscences (1954)

"He roused my admiration when I was young; he caused me to despair when I reached maturity; he is now the comfort of my old age." ~Gioachino Rossini, referring to Mozart

"Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world's great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province... Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated." ~Aaron Copland, Copland on Music (1960)

"It is sobering to think that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead a year." ~Tom Lehrer (speaking of Mozart's early death at the age of just 35 years)

"Handel was the Jupiter of music;... his hallelujahs open the heavens. He utters the word 'Wonderful', as if all their trumpets spoke together. And then, when he comes to earth, to make love admidst nymphs and shepherds (for the beauties of all religions find room within his breast), his strains drip milk and honey, and his love is the youthfulness of the Golden Age." ~Leigh Hunt, 1851

"His character was a mixture of tenderness and coarseness, sensuality and candour, sociability and melancholy." ~Johann Mayrhofer; quoted in Westrup, Schubert Music (1969)

"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." ~Alfred Brendel, 'Schubert's Last Sonatas', in: Music Sounded Out (1990)

"A rare genius whose innocent yearning for affection was expressed in music as pure as spring water." ~Valerie Grove, Laurie Lee: The Well-loved Stranger (1999)

"Whatever my passions demand of me, I become for the time being—musician, poet, director, author, lecturer or anything else." ~Wagner, letter to Liszt

"For me Wagner is impossible... he talks without ever stopping. One can't just talk all the time." ~Robert Schumann, quoted in H Gall, Johannes Brahms (1961)

"Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour." ~Gioacchino Rossini, 1867

"Wagner's art recognises only superlatives, and a superlative has no future. It is an end, and not a beginning." ~Edward Hanslick (1825-1904), Pleasants, ed., Hanslick's Music Criticism (1950)

"His is the art of translating, by subtle gradations, all that is excessive, immense, ambitious in spiritual and natural mankind. On listening to this ardent and despotic music one feels at times as though one discovered again, painted in the depths of a gathering darkness torn asunder by dreams, the dizzy imaginations induced by opium." ~Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris (1861)

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." ~Edgar Wilson Nye (1850 - 1896), quoted in Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1924

"There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal." ~The National, Paris, 1850

"If one has not heard Wagner at Bayreuth, one has heard nothing! Take lots of handkerchiefs because you will cry a great deal! Also take a sedative because you will be exalted to the point of delirium!" ~Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), letter, 1884

"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches—he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased." ~Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Der Fall Wagner (1866)

"Of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningness, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrannel-pipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest—as far as the sound went." ~William Ruskin, letter, 1882, referring to a performance of Die Meistersinger

"A good composer does not imitate; he steals." ~Igor Stravinsky

"Rossini, in music, is the genius of sheer animal spirits. It is a species as inferior to that of Mozart, as the cleverness of a smart boy is to that of a man of sentiment; but it is genius nevertheless." ~Leigh Hunt, Going to the Play Again (1828)

"The point is... a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn't even have a sense of humor. I tell you... there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part of the La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony." ~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

"The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed—a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight." ~Stendahl (1783-1842), Life of Rossini (1824)

"Verdi... has bursts of marvelous passion. His passion is brutal, it is true, but it is better to be impassioned in this way than not at all. His music at times exasperates, but it never bores." ~Georges Bizet (1818-75), letter, 1859

"You require but a simple 'Yes'? Such a small word—but such an important one. But should not a heart so full of unutterable love as mine utter this little word with all its might? I do so and my innermost soul whispers always to you." ~Clara Schumann, letter to Franz Schumann, 1837