„It is typical of Schumann's musical thinking to construct this complex network of references outside his music-to quote Beethoven, and then to have Beethoven's distant beloved refer to Clara. But this should give a clue to the nature of Schumann's achievement. It is not Schumann's music that, refers to Clara but Beethoven's melody, the "secret tone."“

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— Charles Rosen

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 2 : Fragments

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Charles Rosen

US-amerikanischer Pianist und Musiktheoretiker 1927 - 2012

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„To approach Chopin, you have to separate him completely from Schumann. Schumann admired Chopin very much and saw him as friend, but - what only few people know - Chopin himself had much less interest in and esteem for Schumann. In detail: Schumann’s works follow on from a transitional period determined by the successors of Viennese Classicism, particularly Beethoven. Just as the sons of Bach espoused the ‘galant,’ ornamented style of their generation, so the pupils of Mozart and Beethoven - Hummel, Ries, Czerny, Moscheles - took pains to compensate for a thinner musical substance with increased instrumental brilliance and thus prepared the ground for the golden age of the piano and the era of the Romantic virtuoso. Among the multitude of composers writing for the piano at that time, only two - Weber and Schubert - stand out as original creative forces.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„For Beethoven, music was still shape, realized and inflected by instrumental sonority: other realizations may be as absurd as arrangements of the Hammerklavier, for example, always are, but the musical conception takes precedence over its realization in sound. The sonority serves the music. For Schumann, however, as for Chopin and Liszt, the conception was worked out directly within the sonority as a sculptor works directly in clay or marble. The instrumental sound is shaped into music.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

„Schumann's humor is rarely either witty or light: the unrealizable musical structure, the musical motto hidden and partly inaudible, must have stirred his musical fantasy.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

„I was born for soccer, just as Beethoven was born for music.“

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— Pelé Brazilian association football player 1940

Quoted in Parton Keese, The measure of greatness (1980)

„The absolutely inaudible is rejected from music during the period of Viennese Classicism in which every musical line is potentially or imaginatively audible, but it makes a dramatic reappearance in the music of Schumann. The most striking of many examples is one of the episodes in the Humoresk, the last of the great piano works of Schumann's early years. … There are three staves: the uppermost for the right hand; the lowest for the left; the middle, which contains the melody, is not to be played. Note that the melody is no more to be imagined as a specific sound than it is to be played: nothing tells us that the melody is to be heard as vocal or instrumental. This melody, however, is embodied in the upper and lower parts as a kind of after-resonance-out of phase, delicate, and shadowy.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 1 : Music and Sound

„Just because Beethoven doesn’t sound like currently popular art doesn’t mean his music is worthless.“

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— John Varley American science fiction author 1947

"The Phantom of Kansas" (1976), The World Treasury of Science Fiction (ed. David Hartwell), p. 375

„Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody—the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes—regardless of the size of the interval.“

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— Daniel Levitin American psychologist 1957

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

„Such abstruse ideas are totally alien to Chopin. The Romantic interweaving of music and literature that was characteristic of Schumann and Liszt was a negligible source of inspiration. Schumann dedicated Kreisleriana to Chopin, but in fact Chopin’s consciousness for classical strength and form had nothing in common with the exalted, torn, eccentric and confused character of the work.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„The Pianoforte Sonatas of Beethoven must always be among the choicest possessions of all who love music and especially of those who make music their main object and study.“

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— Donald Tovey British composer 1875 - 1940

Introduction to Tovey's Edition of the Beethoven Sonatas

„The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music…. The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is…devestating.“

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— Susan McClary American musicologist 1946

McClary, Susan (1991). Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, p. 128-129. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816618984.

„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.“

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— Modest Mussorgsky Russian composer 1839 - 1881

Letter to Vladimir Stassov, October 18, 1872; Oskar von Riesemann (trans. Paul England) Moussorgsky (1929) p. 107.

„I think that with the death of Schumann and Chopin—‘finis musicae'.“

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— Anton Rubinstein Russian pianist, composer and conductor 1829 - 1894

Quoted in A Conversation on Music (1892)

„Yes, I’m profoundly a representative of the great hypervirtuosic Romantic epoch. But as already mentioned, my roots also go back to Bach and this special style of interpretation, where I’m also at home. In this special field of tension I also see many of the major composers and works in the Romantic tradition. It was no less than Schumann himself who said that great music finds all its combinations in Bach. Indeed, Schumann also builds up his works in polyphonic style, and even in his orchestral scores and symphonic movements he is a counterpointer. As Romantic and modern his work must have seemed to people of his era and lifetime, in main he was a classicist. That means that - and only to name one typical Romantic composer - Schumann cannot be understood without Bach.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

„Music is the fountainhead: everything comes from that. At the moment, I'm getting intoxicated on Beethoven, and I use Pink Floyd for inspiration while making a film. Their music contains a sound for almost everything I do.“

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— Peter Weir Australian film director 1944

Portrait of the artist: Peter Weir, director (2011)

„He [Gilels] played in an easy, natural manner, with strong but unassuming musicianship. His technique was brilliant; years later Neuhaus, still astonished, was to recall Gilels's incredible octaves in Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody. Yet Gilels was never looked upon as a mere virtuoso. As a matter of fact, his programs did not often include music pour epater le bourgeois. He played a stedy diet of Beethoven (the Hammerklavier was a work that strongly engaged his last years), Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms. In many respects, the great virtuoso who put his authoritative stamp on whatever he played was, at the same time, a thinking man's pianist.“

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— Emil Gilels Soviet pianist 1916 - 1985

Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Pianists

„Schumann is the most representative musical figure of central European Romanticism as much because of his limitations as because of his genius: in his finest works, indeed, he exploited these limitations in such a way that they gave a force to his genius that no other contemporary could attain.“

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— Charles Rosen American pianist and writer on music 1927 - 2012

Quelle: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 12 : Schumann: Triumph and Failure of the Romantic Ideal

„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.“

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— Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

Henry, Act II, scene V
Quelle: The Real Thing (1982)
Kontext: Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. 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.

„(Referring to the music of Anton Bruckner) "Nightmarish hangover style" (traumverwirrten Katzenjammerstil)“

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— Eduard Hanslick austrian musician and musicologist 1825 - 1904

From Norman Lebrecht, The Book of Musical Anecdotes (1985, Sphere Books)

„The trends that produced Schumann’s early piano works started out not so much from Weber’s refined brilliance as from Schubert’s more intimate and deeply soul-searching idiom. His creative imagination took him well beyond the harmonic sequences known until his time. He looked at the fugues and canons of earlier composers and discovered in them a Romantic principle. In the interweaving of the voices, the essence of counterpoint found its parallel in the mysterious relationships between the human psyche and exterior phenomena, which Schumann felt impelled to express. Schubert’s broad melodic lyricism has often been contrasted with Schumann’s terse, often quickly repeated motifs, and by comparison Schumann is often erroneously seen as short-winded. Yet it is precisely with these short melodic formulae that he shone his searchlight into the previously unplumbed depths of the human psyche. With them, in a complex canonic web, he wove a dense tissue of sound capable of taking in and reflecting back all the poetical character present. His actual melodies rarely have an arioso form; his harmonic system combines subtle chromatic progressions, suspensions, a rapid alternation of minor and major, and point d’orgue. The shape of Schumann’s scores is characterized by contrapuntal lines, and can at first seem opaque or confused. His music is frequently marked by martial dotted rhythms or dance-like triple time signatures. He loves to veil accented beats of the bar by teasingly intertwining two simultaneous voices in independent motion. This highly inde-pendent instrumental style is perfectly attuned to his own particular compositional idiom. After a period in which the piano had indulged in sensuous beauty of sound and brilliant coloration, in Schumann it again became a tool for conveying poetic monologues in musical terms.“

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— Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

„I have absolutely no difficulty in coming out and saying Bach and Beethoven are great composers. You must school young people into great classical music, but you must also allow them to hear other music as well. At one point classical music colonised the high ground. Now we're reaping the backlash for that.“

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— Joanna MacGregor British musician 1959

The Times, 21/04/2006
On Classical Music

Charles Rosen

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