Piano Music - Dmitri Shostakovitch

Dmitri Shostakovitch

📖 “When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”

📖 “Art destroys silence.”

📖 “Football is the ballet of the masses.”

📖 “I do not wish to listen to people denouncing their parents.”

📖 “When I hear about someone else's pain, I feel pain too. I feel pain for everything - for people and animals.”

📖 “Most people are average, neither black nor white, but grey. A dirty shade of grey. To the best of my ability I tried to write about these people, about their completely average, commonplace dreams and hopes, and about their suspicious tendency towards murder.”

📖 “But I like listening to any music, including bad music. it's a professional disease, an addiction to notes. The brain finds sustenance in any combination of sounds. It works constantly, performing various composerly operations.”

📖 “It makes you think the best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much must perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There's more of a chance then that they'll survive.”

📖 “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.”

📖 “Now I can't abide rudeness, even in so called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities i hate most. Rudeness and cruelty are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.”

📖 “One must speak the truth about the past or not at all.”

📖 “A fresh approach to a work of music (...) usually comes to those who have a fresh approach to aspects of life, to life in general.”

📖 “Badgering a colleague doesn't come from a fit of pique, it comes from an organic quality of the soul. And a mean soul will inevitably be reflected in music. Wagner is a convincing example of that, but far from the only one.”

📖 “Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers of our time and I truly love many of his works. (...) The marvellous composer has invariably been at the centre of my attention, and I not only studied and listened to his music, but I played it and made my own transcriptions as well.”

📖 “What galls me is that these sadists always have fans and followers-- and sincere ones at that. The typical example of this is Toscanini.”

📖 “I don't think that Prokofiev ever treated me seriously as a composer; he considered only Stravinsky a rival and never missed a chance to take a shot at him. I remember once he started telling me some vile story about Stravinsky. I cut him off.”

📖 “Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly.”

Quotes by Dmitri Shostakovich

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