Mozart is Music

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Mozart is the musical Christ.

Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music.

I find consolation and rest in Mozart’s music, wherein he gives expression to that joy of life which was part of his sane and wholesome temperament.

Ludwig van Beethoven

I have always reckoned myself among the greatest admirers of Mozart, and shall remain so until my last breath.

Albert Einstein

Mozart is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven created his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it — that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed.

We cannot despair about mankind knowing that Mozart was a man.

Arthur Miller

Mozart is happiness before it has gotten defined.

Franz Alexander von Kleist

Mozart’s music is so beautiful as to entice angels down to earth.

Franz Schubert

A light, bright, fine day this will remain throughout my whole life. As from afar, the magic notes of Mozart’s music still gently haunts me.

A world that has produced a Mozart is a world worth saving. What a picture of a better world you have given us, Mozart!

Robert Schumann

Does it not seem as if Mozart’s works become fresher and fresher the oftener we hear them?

André Gide

Mozart’s joy is made of serenity, and a phrase of his music is like a calm thought; his simplicity is merely purity. It is a crystalline thing in which all the emotions play a role, but as if already celestially transposed. Moderation consists in feeling emotions as the angels do.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A phenomenon like Mozart remains an inexplicable thing.

Gustave Flaubert

There are three things in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

Gioacchino Rossini

Beethoven I take twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day!

Frédéric Chopin

Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I’ve got only the keyboard in my poor head.

Antonín Dvořák

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Johannes Brahms

If we cannot write with the beauty of Mozart, let us at least try to write with his purity.

Richard Wagner

The most tremendous genius raised Mozart above all masters, in all centuries and in all the arts.

Victor Borge

In my dreams of heaven, I always see the great Masters gathered in a huge hall in which they all reside. Only Mozart has his own suite.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Mozart has the classic purity of light and the red ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.

E.T.A. Hoffmann

Mozart’s music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner being and arouse a higher, intensive life.

Phil Goulding

For one moment in the history of music all opposites were reconciled; all tensions resolved; that luminous moment was Mozart.

In Mozart’s music, all intensity is crystallized in the clearest, the most beautifully balanced and proportioned, and altogether flawless musical forms.

Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf

Mozart does not give the listener time to catch his breath, for no sooner is one inclined to reflect upon a beautiful inspiration than another appears, even more splendid, which drives away the first, and this continues on and on, so that in the end one is unable to retain any of these beauties in the memory.

Edvard Grieg

In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.

Charles Gounod

Mozart exists, and will exist, eternally; divine Mozart – less a name, more a soul descending to us from the heavens, who appeared on this earth, stayed for a little over thirty years, and left it all the more rejuvenated, richer and happier for his appearance.

As with all great artists, Mozart expressed not only the soul, the taste and the aroma of his epoch, but also the spiritual world of man-man for all ages, in all the complexity of his desires, his struggles and ambivalence. Some of us, who only identify in Mozart a certain aristocratic refinement, may find these words strange. Often we meet with a condescending attitude towards him, to his music, reminiscent of chiming bells in a music box! … ‘It’s very nice, but not for me’ say such people, ‘give me passion – Beethoven, Brahms, tragic, monumental…’ Such comments only reveal one thing, these people don’t know Mozart.

Camille Saint-Saëns

Give Mozart a fairy tale and he creates without effort an immortal masterpiece.

What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great composers never sacrificed form to expression. As high as their expression may soar, their musical form remains supreme and all-efficient.

Gabriel Fauré

Mozart’s music is particularly difficult to perform. His admirable clarity exacts absolute cleanness: the slightest mistake in it stands out like black on white. It is music in which all the notes must be heard.

Wanda Landowska

The works of Mozart may be easy to read, but they are very difficult to interpret. The least speck of dust spoils them. They are clear, transparent, and joyful as a spring, and not only those muddy pools which seem deep only because the bottom cannot be seen.

Franz Niemetschek

Mozart wrote everything with such ease and speed as might at first be taken for carelessness or haste. His imagination held before him the whole work clear and lively once it was conceived. One seldom finds in his scores improved or erased passages.

There was nothing exceptional about the physical presence of this extraordinary man; he was small and his appearance gave no sign of his genius, apart from his large intense eyes. […] But in this ungainly body there dwelt an artistic genius such as Nature rarely bestows even upon her most treasured darlings.

Wolfgang Hildesheimer

The riddle of Mozart is precisely that “the man” refuses to be a key for solving it. In death, as in life, he conceals himself behind his work.

A.Hyatt King

Mozart has reached the boundary gate of music and leaped over it, leaving behind the old masters and moderns, and posterity itself.

Maurice Sendak

Designing an opera by Mozart is like doing something for God — it’s a labor of love.

Sir Roger Norrington

When Mozart composed he didn’t have aims of genius, he simply was one.

Georg Solti

Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.

Leonard Bernstein

Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart’s — the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering — a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.

It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

Mozart’s music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

Claudio Arrau

Mozart shows a creative power of such magnitude that one can virtually say that he tossed out of himself one great masterpiece after another.

Peter Shaffer

What was evident was that Mozart had simply written down music already finished in his head. And music finished as no music has ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty…

Stendhal

Sometimes the impact of Mozart’s music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.

Karl Barth

It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.

Mozart’s music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it. Hence earth remains earth, with no need to maintain itself in a titanic revolt against heaven. Granted, darkness, chaos, death and hell do appear, but not for a moment are they allowed to prevail. Knowing all, Mozart creates music from a mysterious center…

Mozart’s music always sounds unburdened, effortless and light. This is why it unburdens, releases and liberates us.

George Szell

21 piano sonatas, 27 piano concertos, 41 symphonies, 18 masses, 13 operas, 9 oratorios and cantata, 2 ballets, 40 plus concertos for various instruments, string quartets, trios and quintets, violin and piano duets piano quartets, and the songs. This astounding output includes hardly one work less than a masterpiece.

Lengthy immersion in the works of other composers can tire. The music of Mozart does not tire, and this is one of its miracles.

Listening to Mozart, we cannot think of any possible improvement.

George Enescu

Mozart is the most representative composer of the musical culture.

Claudiu Iordache

Mozart in Lacrimosa… Sulle scale di aria che montano verso un elogio del cielo, gli vocalizzi tedeschi della Deita…

Thomas Love Peacock

There is nothing perfect in this world except Mozart’s music.

Chopin’s last request was “Play Mozart for me!”

Gustav Mahler’s last word was “Mozart!”

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