Grover wore his fake feet and his pants to pass as human. He wore a green rasta-style cap, because when it rained his curly hair flattened and you could just see the tips of his...

I had a dream about you. You were learning to compose music like Mozart, and I was learning to listen like Beethoven. He was deaf, and you were blind to the fact that you had...

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the...

Je voudrais te rejoindre dans l’idéal d’un art simple, accessible, qui charme d’abord, bouleverse ensuite. Comme toi, je crois que la science, le métier, l’érudition, la virtuosité technique doivent disparaître sous l’apparence d’un naturel aimable.Il...

In 1829 Rossini was at an age which has often proven critical in the lives of musicians, painters and writers. Lapses into silence far more complete than Rossini’s, creative failures, suicides, and unanticipated deaths have...

I think that if Mozart were alive today and decided to become a novelist, he would write humorous fantasy.

indifference” – it is a glorious upsetting of the balance, a turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, in which the Yes rings louder than the ever-present

Am reading the life of Mozart and cannot help thinking that one’s capacity for suffering is in direct proportion to one’s greatness.

I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends–and I from Legends created only the ordinary!

Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed...

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could...

He said the only thing he’d allow is Mozart.

The only thing–I tell you this straight from the heart–that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can’t have any proper social intercourse with those people–and that music does not have a better reputation…For I...

For the celebration I got champagne flutes, even though I’m not musical. That night I felt like Mozart. He was a drunk, right?

I pay no attention whatever to anybody’s praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

Le Requiem de Mozart. Un souffle de l’au-delà y plane. Comment croire, après une pareille audition, que l’univers n’ait aucun sens? Il faut qu’il en ait un. Que tant de sublime se résolve dans le...