Beethoven Symphony Quotes

#1. I don't know if this is true to you but for me
sometimes it gets so bad
that anything else
say like
looking at a bird on an overhead
power line
seems as great as a Beethoven symphony.
then you forget it and you're back
again.

Charles Bukowski

#2. A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

Andre Previn

#3. You can chase a Beethoven symphony all your life and never catch up.

Andre Previn

#4. I free-form it, rock n' roll it. I'm a creature of risk, so I don't know how I'm going to explore a Beethoven symphony until I'm doing it.

Charles Hazlewood

#5. As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.

Michael Hersch

#6. What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

Brian Greene

#7. A friend of mine tells me that a Beethoven symphony can solve for him a problem of conduct. I've no doubt that it does so simply by giving him a sense of the tragedy and the greatness of human destiny, which makes his personal anxieties seem small, which throws them into a new proportion.

Joyce Cary

#8. It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

Albert Einstein

#9. Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

Jacques Barzun

#10. When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

Madeleine L'Engle

#11. The reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

Anne Fadiman

#12. Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.

Robertson Davies

#13. You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.

Hugh MacLeod

#14. When Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.

Joshua Bell

#15. Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics,

Charlie Chaplin

#16. I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. Oh, well
he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.

Kurt Vonnegut

#17. Da Vinci painted one Mona Lisa. Beethoven composed one Fifth Symphony. And God made one version of you.

Max Lucado

#18. The contemporary music of Tina Turner might make you feel powerful and energized. South African music provides a mind-boggling choice of styles from folk tunes to jive. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony has the magical ability to transport you to a country scene and trap you in a driving rain storm.

Jason Harvey

#19. Kahn once said, The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Robert Hughes

#20. I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it?

Isaac Asimov

#21. I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.

Maximilian Schell

#22. For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.

Gustavo Dudamel

#23. If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?

Robert Fripp

#24. At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#25. There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before.

A.P. Herbert

#26. Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful.
If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful.
If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.

Paul Erdos

#27. The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...

William Gaddis

#28. In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn't compose the 'Ninth Symphony,' no one else before or after is going to compose the 'Ninth Symphony' that he composed; no one else is going to paint 'Starry Night' by van Gogh.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#29. Women play cellos and violins in symphony orchestras. They're playing Beethoven and Bach. What do you mean they can't play rock and roll?

Joan Jett

#30. Why we are here: To tremble at the terrible beauty of the stars, to shed a tear at the perfection of Beethoven's symphonies, and to crack a cold one now and then.

David Letterman

#31. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

E. M. Forster

#32. Mathematics is an activity governed by the same rules imposed upon the symphonies of Beethoven, the paintings of DaVinci, and the poetry of Homer.

Edward Kasner

#33. You've been listening to the adagio from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I think Ludwig pretty much summed up death in this one. You know, he had lost just about all his hearing when he wrote it, and I've often wondered if that didn't help him tune into the final silence of the great beyond.

Andrew Schneider

#34. In South America, I heard the 8th Symphony of Beethoven. And the young conductor thought, Beethoven must be heroic. But this is piece which shouldn't be heroic. And this was such a misunderstanding, such a deep misunderstanding.

Kurt Masur

#35. And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Kurt Vonnegut