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"He'd be better off shoveling snow"
-- Richard Strauss on Arnold Schoenberg

When told that a soloist would need six fingers to perform his concerto,

Arnold Schoenberg replied, "I can wait."

"I would like to hear Elliot Carter's Fourth String Quartet, if only to
discover what a cranky prostate does to one's polyphony."
-- James Sellars

"Exit in case of Brahms"
-- Philip Hale's proposed inscription over the doors of Boston Symphony
Hall

"Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's
always by Villa-Lobos?"
-- Igor Stravinsky

"His music used to be original. Now it's aboriginal."
-- Sir Ernest Newman on Igor Stravinsky

"If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been
better for music."
-- Maurice Ravel on Camille Saint-Saens

"He has an enormously wide repertory. He can conduct anything, provided
its
by Beethoven, Brahms or Wagner. He tried Debussy's La Mer once. It came
out as
Das Merde."
-- Anonymous Orchestra Member on George Szell

Someone commented to Rudolph Bing, manager of the Metropolitan Opera,
that
George Szell is his own worst enemy. "Not while I'm alive, he isn't!"
said Bing.

"After I die, I shall return to earth as a gatekeeper of a bordello and
I won't let any of you enter."
-- Arturo Toscanini to the NBC Orchestra

"We cannot expect you to be with us all the time, but perhaps you could
be
good enough to keep in touch now and again."
-- Sir Thomas Beecham to a musician during a rehearsal

"Jack Benny played Mendelssohn last night. Mendelssohn lost."
-- Anonymous

The great German conductor Hans von Buelow detested two members of an
orchestra, who were named Schultz and Schmidt. Upon being told that
Schmidt had died,
von Buelow immediately asked, "Und Schultz?"

"Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed."
-- Ralph Novak on Yoko Ono

"Parsifal--the kind of opera that starts at six o'clock and after it has

been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6:20."
-- David Randolph

"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I
certainly don't intend hearing it a second time."
-- Gioacchino Rossini

"I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music."
-- Benjamin Britten on Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
--Richard Strauss

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go

slow."
-- Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
-- Mark Twain (guess Twain gets in here on literary merit alone)

"Already too loud!"
-- Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on
seeing the players reaching for their instruments.

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play
Bach
and starve."
-- Xavier Cugat

"[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen
every
time. They really are interested in music and art."
--Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home

"In opera, there is always too much singing."
-- Claude Debussy

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful, opera would be if there were no
singers!"
-- Gioacchino Rossini >>
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM WED 8-9PM PST

On Music and Musicians

🔗kraig grady <kraiggrady@...>

🔗Joseph Pehrson <jpehrson@...>