Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.