Piano Music - Sergei Bortkiewicz

Sergei Bortkiewicz

📖 "And the tempo! For God's sake this tempo, this horrible sickness of our times. The clever Romans have already said: non multi sed multi. one should not see as much as possible but observe, take time, consider, digest the impression! And so this is with music! One should not hear as much musical pieces as possible, but good ones, because there can be no art 'en masse' which deserves respect. Art is elitist, and so is the enjoyment of art, because one must devote hours of the most reverential understanding just to it."
Sergei Bortkiewicz Recollections, Letters and Documents (1922)

📖 "Enjoyment of art was a real necessity in Russia at that time [last decades of pre-revolutionary Russia], the enthusiast was ready ti sacrifice anything for art. Why did this happen? Wherein lies the mutual influence of the public on the artist and the other way round? What role does the current state of a country play in this? Would Shakespeare have become the greatest poet if he had been born a few decades before or after the Renaissance period of Queen Elizabeth? Why does a renaissance of art always follow an epoch of shallowness and decay? Why ha not America produced a single great artist, England no great musician? These are difficult problems, which a psychologist can hardly unravel because art extends into metaphysics."
Sergei Bortkiewicz Recollections, Letters and Documents (1922)

📖 "One thing is certain, for me at least, that the Mechanization of Art nowadays is a great backward step. The cinema is the greatest enemy of the theatre, the radio - of music in the house and concerts. The temples of art still stand there, but how little and how seldom are they visited, how much have they atoned for the reverential atmosphere which once enveloped the visitor even when entering the temple of art. Nowadays people crowd to the nearest … cinema house, or they remain at home listening to Tristan and Isolde on the radio at supper … with completely distorted tone and revolting hissing sound, without the middle voices, often without bass, a pitiful caricature of wonderful music."
Sergei Bortkiewicz Recollections, Letters and Documents (1922)

📖 "If playing in the house is dying out, so also is music. What one produces oneself, for example on the piano, while trying to analyse and study a piece of music, even if it sounds terrible, is worth more than the hundreds of hours that one spends at the radio."
Sergei Bortkiewicz Recollections, Letters and Documents (1922)

📖 "Most if the revolutionaries and nihilists carried out their mischief just for fun, out of boredom. In Germany the school teacher has worked like a true patriot for the people and the fatherland. When a Russian student went 'among the people', it was more with the intent of rousing them against the government, rather than a genuine patriotic wish to do cultural work. Even at that time the poison of Marxist ideas had been imported from abroad, even at that time the first Bolsheviks had been formed."
Sergei Bortkiewicz Recollections, Letters and Documents (1922)

📖 "A false idea is more destructive than plague, war, or earthquakes."
Sergei Bortkiewicz Recollections, Letters and Documents (1922)

📖 "It is only with age that a man can look back at the mistakes that he has made in his life."
Sergei Bortkiewicz Recollections, Letters and Documents (1922)

📖 "The Marxists have demolished the best and the most valuable in Russia. The communists have committed the most heinous crime: they have distorted, destroyed the Russian soul."
Sergei Bortkiewicz Recollections, Letters and Documents (1922)

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Download Piano Music by Sergei Bortkiewicz

Piano music by Sergei Bortkiewicz

Some Recordings of Bortkiewicz's Piano Music

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