Top 64 Brahms's Quotes
#1. In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms's four symphonies and Richard Strauss's tone poems.
Zubin Mehta
#2. I saw Brahms's Hungarian Rhapsody on television when I was two. Tom and Jerry were playing it together. I thought, 'Hey, if a cat can play like that, why can't I?'
Lang Lang
#3. The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.
Joseph Joachim
#4. Brahms believed that there was no need to publish absolutely everything that Schubert ever wrote.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
#5. Classical pianist Awadagin Pratt. I first heard this eccentric and introverted performer when I was living in the Midwest. He was playing Brahms ballades - haunting.
Daniel Breaker
#6. It is not hard to compose but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table ... So many melodies fly about, one must be careful not to tread on them.
Johannes Brahms
#7. Every orchestra is different. Sometimes, you're blown away by a particular musician. If I'm playing the Brahms concerto, it's crucial to have a great oboe player, because we work in tandem.
Joshua Bell
#8. To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.
Leonard Slatkin
#9. In him converge all previous streams of tendency, not as into a pool, stagnant, passive, motionless, but as a noble river that received its tributary waters and bearss them onward in larger and statelier volume.
Johannes Brahms
#10. Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop.
Jan Swafford
#11. Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world.
Jane Asher
#12. Never criticize the composition of a Royal Highness. You never know who may have written it.
Johannes Brahms
#13. Fortunately, I started very young, so I read music very well. And my favorite composers to play are Brahms and Mozart.
Condoleezza Rice
#14. I can't stand being in Chicago anymore and hearing the Brahms Violin Concerto in the elevator. Because that shows me that when they come to the concert hall they listen to it in the same way.
Daniel Barenboim
#15. It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
Johannes Brahms
#16. The idea comes to me from outside of me - and is like a gift. I then take the idea and make it my own - that is where the skill lies.
Johannes Brahms
#17. Those are miracles that no merely human brain can work. The artist is merely the sound conduct of a Force that dictates to him what he should do.
Johannes Brahms
#19. It is a real pleasure to see music so bright and spontaneous expressed with corresponding ease and grace.
Johannes Brahms
#20. My things really are written with an appalling lack of practicality!
Johannes Brahms
#21. I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying 'I don't want to make a cemetery of your compositions.'
Hugo Wolf
#22. At breakfast, I might pass a Brahms symphony in my head. Then I am called to the phone, and half an hour later I find it's been going on all the time and I'm in the third movement.
Arthur Rubinstein
#23. We cling nervously to the melody, but we don't handle it freely, we don't really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it.
Johannes Brahms
#25. One should never forget that by actually perfecting one piece one gains and learns more than by starting or half-finishing a dozen.
Johannes Brahms
#26. Reviewer: 'One of your themes was very similar to one of Beethoven's!' Brahms replied, 'Of course it is. Everyone steals - the important thing is to do it brilliantly.
Johannes Brahms
#27. The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.
Bennett Cerf
#28. Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
Johannes Brahms
#29. The only true immortality lies in one's children.
[Letter to his friend, Richard Heuberger]
Johannes Brahms
#30. What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.
Brian Greene
#31. Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.
Nigel Kennedy
#32. For the shallow delights of matrimony and opera I have no courage.
Johannes Brahms
#33. A landscape, torn by mists and clouds, in which I can see ruins of old churches, as well as of Greek temples - that is Brahms.
Edvard Grieg
#34. I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.
Elie Wiesel
#35. If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.
Kurt Masur
#36. I think one of the reasons it ended was that his eyes never lit up for me the way they did for classical music. I realize that in the long run I may not be as wonderful as a Brahms symphony but I think I'm good for a Haydn quintet.
Daniel Handler
#37. Nothing is so lovely as a quietly snoring dog and some evening Brahms, as you sit in a comfortably overstuffed chair with your feet on the footstool.
Ann Beattie
#39. I don't believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.
Oscar Peterson
#40. The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins.
Hans Von Bulow
#41. Those who enjoy their own emotionally bad health and who habitually fill their own minds with the rank poisons of suspicion, jealousy and hatred, as a rule take umbrage at those who refuse to do likewise, and they find a perverted relief in trying to denigrate them.
Johannes Brahms
#42. There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
George Bernard Shaw
#43. How can you have faith in human nature when you think that a sewer and certain moments of Schumann or Brahms are connected by secret, shadowy, subterranean passageways.
Ernesto Sabato
#44. I sometimes ponder on variation form and it seems to me it ought to be more restrained, purer.
Johannes Brahms
#45. Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
Johannes Brahms
#46. Brahms stayed an extra day to hear my [Fifth] Symphony and was very kind ... I like his honesty and open-mindedness. Neither he nor the players liked the finale, which I also think rather horrible.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
#47. After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#48. If we cannot write with the beauty of Mozart, let us at least try to write with his purity.
Johannes Brahms
#49. Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.
Franz Liszt
#50. I stick to playing Brahms, but I love listening to Led Zeppelin, and I've also been a big fan of Earth Wind and Fire since the Seventies and of The Gap Band since the Eighties.
Condoleezza Rice
#52. The fact that most people do not understand and respect the very best things, such as Mozart's concertos, is what permits men like us to become famous.
Johannes Brahms
#54. That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.
Elliott Carter
#55. What would become of all historical biography if it was written only with consideration for other peoples' feelings?
Johannes Brahms
#56. I play a lot chamber music.As for something that's hard for me to play, before I leave this Earth I'm hoping to play Brahms' Second Piano Concerto.
Condoleezza Rice
#57. Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration.
Johannes Brahms
#58. If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon.
Johannes Brahms
#59. In my study I can lay my hand on the Bible in the pitch dark. All truly inspired ideas come from God. The powers from which all truly great composers like Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven drew their inspirations is the same power that enabled Jesus to do his miracles.
Johannes Brahms
#60. If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#61. To follow in Beethoven's footsteps transcends one's strength.
Johannes Brahms
#62. The only work that can be compared to Chopin's Etudes, innovatively, where every note is essential and one becomes completely exposed, is the Brahms-Paganini variations. These are etudes - not as interesting musically as, say, the Brahms-Handel - but they are incredible.
Carlo Grante
#63. How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.
Johannes Brahms
#64. I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
Nigel Kennedy
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