Piano Music - Pyotr Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Tchaikovsky

📖 "Music is not illusion, but revelation."

📖 "Where the heart does not enter; there can be no music."

📖 "Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul's moods."

📖 "Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy."

📖 ":…You see, my dear friend, I am made up of contradictions, and I have reached a very mature age without resting upon anything positive, without having calmed my restless spirit either by religion or philosophy. Undoubtedly I should have gone mad but for music. Music is indeed the most beautiful of all Heaven's gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. Alone it calms, enlightens, and stills our souls. It is not the straw to which the drowning man clings; but a true friend, refuge, and comforter, for whose sake life is worth living"

📖 "To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present: that is what I spend my whole life doing"

📖 "Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul."

📖 "There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest (inspiration) does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination."

📖 "How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry...As the poet Heine said, 'Where words leave off, music begins.'"

📖 "If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments."

📖 "After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison."

📖 "The creative process is like music which takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity"

📖 "Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music."

📖 "I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous."

📖 "On my word of honour, I have never felt such self-satisfaction, such pride, such happiness, as in the knowledge that I have created a good thing."
In Letter to P. Jugenson (August 1893), on the sixth Symphony

Quotes by Pyotr Tchaikovsky

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Selected Recordings of Tchaikovsky's Piano Music

Tchaikovsky - Méditation, Op. 72 No.5
Sviatoslav Richter, piano

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