Great musical thoughts

This amusing collection was forwarded to my husband and I (who are professional musicians) by a musical relative (also a musician). Enjoy:


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

"[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.

"The amount of money one needs is terrifying..." - Ludwig van Beethoven

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats." - Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan.

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together." - Mel Brooks

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." - William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain

"I love Beethoven, especially the poems." - Ringo Starr

"If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder." - Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major." - Sergei Prokofiev

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra... Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?" - Dimitri Mitropolous

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

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano." - Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller, but applicable in many other situations.

"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

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse." - Bing Crosby