Bach Quotes
More Bach Quotes
From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, The substance of my dreams took fire. You built cathedrals in my heart, And lit my pinnacled desire.
— 1918 'Dead Musicians'.
The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile.
Glenn Gould— "So You Want To Write A Fugue", Glenn Gould Reader p240
Whether the angels play only Bach in praising God I am not quite sure; I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart.
Karl Barth— 1968 Quoted in the NewYork Times.
You play Bach your way and I'll play him his way.
wanda landowska— Refusing to adapt her technique to suit another Bach specialist. Quoted in Clifton Fadiman The Faber Book of Anecdotes (1985).
Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.
(Lula) Carson ne e Smith McCullers— 1953 Clock Without Hands.
Bach on the wrong notes.
— Of the music of Stravinsky. Quoted inV Seroff Sergei Prokofiev (1968).
Von dem Bach is so clever he can do anything, get around anything.
erich von dem bach— Adolf Hitler, as quoted in The Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of World War II (1978) by Thomas D. Parrish and Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, p. 45
I feel about Keaton the way an organist thinks of Bach.
marty feldman— Marty Feldman - Six Degrees of Separation, BBC4.
I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that -- its humanity.
Glenn Gould— Gramophone
The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life.
helen hayes— Ch. 14 (On Reflection (1968))
The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.
George Steiner— Ch. 6 (p. 225)
Vous me priez de vous dire…S'il est vrai que l'acte de foi de tout ce qui prétend aimer l'art élevé et sérieux soit celui-ci:;: "Il n'y a pas d'autre Dieu que Bach, et Mendelssohn est son prophète"?
hector berlioz— You request me to tell you…if it is true that the creed of all who profess to love high and serious art is: "There is no God but Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet"?"Premier Voyage en Allemagne", Quatrième lettre, p. 285
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.
Arthur Koestler— The Act of Creation, London, (1970) p. 253.
B. B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach.
ilana mercer— "Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad And The Beastly" American Daily Herald, March 10, 2014
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
dmitri shostakovich— Letter to Isaac Glikman, August 28, 1955; Josiah Fisk & Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (1997) p. 364.
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet .
Arthur Koestler— Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation [ ]
B. B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach.
— "Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad And The Beastly" American Daily Herald, March 10, 2014
He is terribly rare. He is like Bach , who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled.
— George Balanchine in Nabokov, Ivan and Carmichael, Elizabeth. "Balanchine, An Interview". Horizon, January 1961, pp. 44-56. (M)
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.
herbert marcuse— p. 64 (One-Dimensional Man (1964))
