Top 100 Quotes About Beethoven's Music
#2. Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.
Daniel Barenboim
#3. Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch
Slavoj Zizek
#4. If some of those people who wanted to ban Beethoven's music could hear the music that's being played today, wow, what would they do, man?
Smokey Robinson
#6. I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.
A.R. Rahman
#7. I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.
Joshua Bell
#8. I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven.
George Bernard Shaw
#10. With a piece of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, on first listening I'm referencing it with other pieces by them that I know. I think that most people do this - they listen to pieces through the filter of pieces they already know.
Paul Lansky
#11. In these few minutes, I was Beethoven's captive and I couldn't have been a more willing participant.
Stormy Smith
#12. Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#13. How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
Edward Abbey
#14. 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
#16. There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.
Virginia Graham
#17. Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.
Joshua Bell
#18. I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
#19. I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#20. I was born to play football, just like Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint.
Pele
#21. It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.
Dean Koontz
#22. Richard Wagner commenting on the music of Ludvig Van Beethoven: He was a Titan, wrestling with the Gods.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#23. Jesus never heard of Beethoven and Bach. Why aren't we playing more country music in church ?
Tex Sample
#24. Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.
Thomas Beecham
#25. They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.
Haruki Murakami
#26. Life would be flat without music. It is the background to all I do. It speaks to the heart in its own special way like nothing else.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#27. He who understand my music will remain free from the miseries that the other men are dragging with them .
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#28. I think it's time they knew the truth about Beethoven.
Joan Rivers
#29. I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.
I.M. Pei
#30. I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.
Tod Machover
#31. The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are.
Stephen J. Rivele
#32. 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
#33. Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.
Nigel Kennedy
#34. There are different people who got me into music, but what I liked about Beethoven is that even when I didn't understand it or it was too long, there's still something about it that drove me to it. Then it got me excited about actually learning music, like a theory of it.
Albert Hammond Jr.
#35. 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
#36. I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.
Colm Toibin
#37. Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.
John Updike
#38. At that moment a solitary violin struck up. But the music was not dance music; it was more like a song - a solemn, sweet song. (I know now that it was Beethoven's Romance in F.) I listened, and suddenly it was as if the fog that surrounded me had been penetrated, as if I were being spoken to.
Jennifer Paynter
#39. 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
#40. What I have in my heart and soul - must find a way out. That's the reason for music.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#41. I'm trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It's fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing.
Evan Peters
#42. I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better."
The lady gave a discriminating smile.
"I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments.
Henry James
#43. Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.
Frederic Chopin
#44. Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#45. I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.
James Ellroy
#46. I think that cheap music often does make you dream more than more serious music, whether that's serious music by Beethoven or Miles Davis or Pink Floyd ... if the Floyd ever did serious music, which I seriously doubt.
Jonathan Meades
#47. On behalf of all that is good and melodic, Ludwig van Beethoven, I apologize.
Sarah Strohmeyer
#48. In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky
#49. The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let's call it, 'collective unconscious' of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.
Gian Carlo Menotti
#50. Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#51. For many artists fame complements the value of creative self-expression. Ludwig van Beethoven loved composing music, but he probably would have enjoyed it less if no one ever listened to the product.
Tyler Cowen
#52. Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times.
Smokey Robinson
#53. Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.
Karen DeCrow
#54. I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.
Frans De Waal
#55. Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#56. The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The music that the musical community selects, however, is usually the very best.
David Finckel
#58. I'm very eclectic in my music tastes - anything from Nina Simone to Beethoven to Talvin Singh.
Monica Ali
#59. Imagine listening to Beethoven with the prepossession that C is a good note and F a bad one; yet this is exactly the stand point from which all uninitiates contemplate the universe. Obviously, they miss the music.
Aleister Crowley
#61. Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.
Daniel Barenboim
#62. I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were expressing a vision that was beyond the mundane.
Frederick Lenz
#63. Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don't believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.
W. Somerset Maugham
#64. Do you think if two people liked the same thing, it could bring them closer together?"
"Certainly ... Take classical music, for instance ... Two people who shared a love for Beethoven could become very close ... "
"How about TV?
Charles M. Schulz
#65. Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
Douglas Adams
#66. I remembered that Beethoven's symphonies had sometimes been given names ... they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.
Alan Bradley
#67. Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
John Ruskin
#68. Music is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#69. A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.
Andre Previn
#70. I have truly eclectic taste in music, and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; world music, Brit-pop, classic rock, blues/jazz, even the odd bit of heavy metal.
Rachel Miner
#71. I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?
Nicolas Cage
#72. No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.
E. M. Forster
#73. Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, none of them were born in Vienna. They all moved there. It became a magnet, but what made it magnetized in the first place? There has to be a seed there. In the case of Vienna of about 1780, it was this deep-seated love of music.
Eric Weiner
#75. And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.
Tony Randall
#76. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
Tom Stoppard
#77. He that divines the secret of my music is freed from the unhappiness that haunts the whole world of men.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#78. 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
#79. I wish you music to help with the burdens of life ,and to help you release your happiness to others.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#80. Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#81. There's no denying that Caruso came with a voice?that Beethoven came with music in his soul, Picasso was drawing like an angel in the crib.You're born with it.
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
#82. My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them.
James Brown
#83. Music is the electric soil in which the spirit thinks, lives and invents. All that's electrical stimulates the mind to flowing surging musical creation. I am electrical by nature.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#85. 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
#86. He didn't care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around?
Stephen King
#88. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.
Henry Miller
#89. Guided By Voices was huge when I was 16. Then I got into the Beatles, then classical music, Beethoven.
Albert Hammond Jr.
#90. I've outdone anyone you can name - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
James Brown
#91. I despise a world which does not feel that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#92. If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music ... and of aviation.
Tom Stoppard
#93. Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#94. 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
#95. Beethoven concertos ... Tchaicovsky concertos ... with a lot of these wonderful masterpieces there's always something wonderful to find ... there's always something new to find ...
Itzhak Perlman
#96. If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
Simon Rattle
#97. The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.
H.L. Mencken
#98. When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.
Dave Brubeck
#99. While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets.
Adam Mansbach
#100. Music should be an elective experience. You should go, "I'm going to sit down and listen to some Beethoven, by God," and then you get to hear it.
Linda Ronstadt
