Quotes & Sayings About The Piano By Beethoven

In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries. — Michael Dirda

Where, then, is any particular gene - say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance - or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits. — James Gleick

I play the piano and have been playing since I was 7, mainly classical Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart. — Kiana Tom

It is only by demanding the impossible of the piano that you can obtain from it all that is possible. For the psychologist this means that imagination and desire are ahead of the possible reality. A deaf Beethoven created for the piano sounds never heard before and thus predetermined the development of the piano for several decades to come. The composer's creative spirit imposes on the piano rules to which it gradually conforms. That is the history of the instrument's development. I don't know of any case where the reverse occurred. — Heinrich Neuhaus

They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard. — Haruki Murakami

For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and motivation second. To groom world-class athletes and musicians, experts looked for people with the right raw abilities, and then sought to motivate them. If you want to find people who can dunk like Michael Jordan or play piano like Beethoven, it's only natural to start by screening candidates for leaping ability and an ear for music. But in recent years, psychologists have come to believe that this approach may be backward. — Adam M. Grant

I've got this perception of Beethoven where he's just, like, really pissed all the time. Yeah, ol' Ludwig, he had a lot to pound on the piano bitterly about. I'm Germannnn! I'm deaffff! I'm bliiiind! My name is Ludwigggg!

Was he blind? I'm pretty sure.

Or, wait, maybe that was Helen Keller.

Was he even German?

Was she German?

Is Ludwig a name?

I'm starting to worry I'm just making shit up. — Hannah Johnson

I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do! — Charles Hazlewood

I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work. — I.M. Pei

I don't take much from my own father, because he was a very austere, quiet, private man who would come home from work, go to his parlour and play Beethoven on his piano. — John Mahoney

Can you play the piano like Beethoven? Or sing like Carly Simon? Can you take fie pages' worth of quotes and turn them into a usable story ten minutes before deadline? I don't think so, unless you have more hidden talents I don't know about. We all have our special sills. They don't make us better or worse than each other. Just different — Jennifer Estep

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece. — Lady Gaga

The grim portrait of Beethoven hanging over the piano ... was removed from its nail, and an equally grim portrait of Hitler was hung on the same nail ... Mama ... insisted that Beethoven be placed, if not over the sofa, at least over the sideboard. This resulted in the grimmest of confrontations: Hitler and the genius hung opposite each other, stared at each other, saw through each other, yet found no joy in what they saw. — Gunter Grass

In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there's a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished - but more innovative - than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos - demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship - are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments. A — David Bayles

As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano. — Michael Hersch

I'm trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It's fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing. — Evan Peters

I have owned and played a Steinway all my life. It's the best Beethoven piano. The best Chopin piano. And the best Ray Charles piano. I like it, too. — Randy Newman

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear. — John Ruskin

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable cloth by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors ? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and wich is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods. — Joseph Conrad