Top 96 Quotes About Mahler
#1. My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.
James Horner
#2. To be passionate in today's world is not politically correct ... Nowadays we are supposed to cope. This was not Mahler's problem. He saw it, he heard it, and he expressed it. He was a kaleidoscopic, Olympian figure.
Lorin Maazel
#3. Mahler wrote it as the third movement of his Fourth Symphony. I mean the fourth movement of his First Symphony. We play it third. The trumpet solo will be played by our solo trumpet player. It's named 'Blumine,' which has something to do with flowers.
Eugene Ormandy
#4. Einstein Freud Marx Proust Mahler Mendelssohn Chagall & don't forget Dr. Jonas Salk ... & still they hate us!
Sonia Taitz
#5. I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all.
Jessye Norman
#6. Anything of a serious nature isn't "instant" - you can't "do" the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God's sake?
Jonathan Cott
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I have always adored Mahler, and Mahler was a major influence on the music of the Beatles. John and me used to sit and do the Kindertotenlieder and Wunderhorn for hours, we'd take turns singing and playing the piano. We thought Mahler was gear.
Paul McCartney
#10. Garris had pet names for all of them. Mahler was the Mad Doktor. Franz Liszt was Son of Lovecraft. Mendelssohn was Santa Claus Meets the Hell's Angels. Beethoven was the High School Principal.
Chet Williamson
#11. Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual.
Maureen Forrester
#12. Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth!
Malcolm Arnold
#13. I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I'm reading biographies of Mahler.
Gustavo Dudamel
#14. I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his passion. He must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street.
Charles Bukowski
#15. I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence.
Jeffrey Tate
#16. We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection.
Philip Kitcher
#17. I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.
Antonio Damasio
#18. I'm on the cross. be kind and they put you on the cross. that son of a bitch on his couch talking about Mahler and Kant and cunt and revolution, not really knowing about any of them.
Charles Bukowski
#19. I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.
Philip Kitcher
#20. Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#21. My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.
Patti LuPone
#22. In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.
John Tavener
#23. I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.
Rufus Wainwright
#24. Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.
Philip Kitcher
#25. You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
#26. A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
Anthony Burgess
#27. At the age of six, Mahler accepted paid commissions as a composer, something he was never to do in later life, his mother having promised him two kreuzers on condition that he did not make any ink blots on the expensive music manuscript paper.
Jens Malte Fischer
#28. Using the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth is one of the touches of pure genius in Visconti's film (even though Mahlerians complain very loudly that the piece has been ruined), since it corresponds perfectly to Aschenbach's yearnings and to his circling walks around Venice.
Philip Kitcher
#29. Tradition is the spreading of fire and not the veneration of ashes.
Gustav Mahler
#30. But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.
Gustav Mahler
#31. To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.
Gustav Mahler
#32. To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.
Gustav Mahler
#33. The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.
Gustav Mahler
#34. In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.
Gustav Mahler
#35. The important thing is never to let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries; to continue steadfastly on one's way without
letting oneself be either defeated by failure or diverted by applause.
Gustav Mahler
#36. I am thrice homeless, as a bohemian, as an Austrian, and all over the world, you guessed it right I am Jewish
Gustav Mahler
#37. It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces.
Gustav Mahler
#38. The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi.
Gustav Mahler
#39. The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.
Gustav Mahler
#40. Both my marriages were failures! Number one departed, and number two stayed
Gustav Mahler
#41. What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.
Gustav Mahler
#42. The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form.
Gustav Mahler
#43. In a supersonic jet, you'll land before you take off. Your watch - if it's working right - will go back. (It'll stop if it's not). You've made a journey forwards and backwards at the same time. The trip will make you younger.
Zdenek Mahler
#45. Destiny smiles upon me but without making me the least bit happier.
Gustav Mahler
#46. Sadness is a cloak that covers our heart, but it can never extinguish love.
Barbara A. Mahler
#47. It is a funny thing, but when I am making music, all the answers I seek for in life seem to be there, in the music. Or rather, I should say, when I am making music, there are no questions and no need for answers.
Gustav Mahler
#48. It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.
Gustav Mahler
#50. The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.
Gustav Mahler
#51. Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already.
Gustav Mahler
#52. Spring won't let me stay in this house any longer! I must get out and breathe the air deeply again.
Gustav Mahler
#53. I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young ... he killed himself in the prime of his life.
Gustav Mahler
#54. Even if people censure me, they should do so hat in hand.
Gustav Mahler
#55. A true personality ... is like a robust organism that, with unconscious sureness, seeks out and digests the nourishment appropriate to it and vigorously rejects that which is unsuitable.
Gustav Mahler
#56. In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage.
Gustav Mahler
#57. Fortunately, something always remains to be harvested. So let us not be idle.
Gustav Mahler
#59. Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way.
Gustav Mahler
#60. Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking.
Gustav Mahler
#62. In Bach, the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.
Gustav Mahler
#63. Tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes.
Gustav Mahler
#64. Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.
Gustav Mahler
#65. What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.
Gustav Mahler
#66. All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish.
Gustav Mahler
#67. I beg of you ... never assume an inner or an outer pose, never a disguise.
Gustav Mahler
#68. Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos.
Gustav Mahler
#69. It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.
Gustav Mahler
#70. I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment.
Gustav Mahler
#71. I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.
Gustav Mahler
#72. I live like a Hottentot. I cannot exchange one sensible word with anyone.
Gustav Mahler
#73. I hope you will no longer accuse me of a lack of delicacy. as I now count on your understanding.
Gustav Mahler
#74. If I weren't the way I am, I shouldn't write my symphonies.
Gustav Mahler
#75. If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Gustav Mahler
#76. Only when I experience do I compose - only when I compose do I experience.
Gustav Mahler
#77. Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.
Gustav Mahler
#78. It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going.
Gustav Mahler
#79. New York City revived around the team. I don't think you can look at the recovery of New York from the 1970s without, on some level, talking about Steinbrenner. Even if you're just talking about the feel of the city, he was part of a creation of a new sense of optimism.
Jonathan Mahler
#81. If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster.
Gustav Mahler
#82. When I have reached a summit, I leave it with great reluctance, unless it is to reach for another, higher one.
Gustav Mahler
#83. My time will come, that is: after the finish of the recurring song cycles
Gustav Mahler
#84. The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content.
Gustav Mahler
#85. You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.
Gustav Mahler
#86. The real art of conducting consists in transitions.
Gustav Mahler
#87. A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.
Gustav Mahler
#88. I don't let myself get carried away by my own ideas - I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day.
Gustav Mahler
#89. I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier.
Gustav Mahler
#90. A full cup of wine at the right time is worth more than all the kingdoms of this earth!
Gustav Mahler
#92. That which draws us by its mystical force; what every created thing, even the very stones, feels with absolute certainty as the center of its being ... is the force of love. Christians call this "eternal blessedness." It is a necessity of man for growth and joy.
Gustav Mahler
#93. I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.
Gustav Mahler
#94. Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
Gustav Mahler
#95. It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.
Gustav Mahler
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