Quotes
from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce:
"The clarinet is a musical instrument the only thing worse than which is two."
Submitted by Mea
Mark Twain on Wagner's Parsifal:
I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of *Parsifal* anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody; one person performed at a time -- and a long time, too -- often in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only pulled out long notes, then some short ones, then another long one, then a sharp, quick, peremptory bark or two -- and so on and so on; and when he was done you saw that the information which he had conveyed had not compensated for the disturbance.
Submitted by Vera A. Nazarov
Orson Welles' critique of Donny Osmond:
"He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
Ludwig van Beethoven to a fellow composer:
"I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music."
Rossini's opinion of another composer:
"Monsieur Wagner has lovely moments but some terrible quarters-of-an-hour."
Rossini's contrasting view of himself:
"Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music."
From a review by Hedda Hopper:
"Her singing was mutiny on the High Cs."
Mark Twain makes this back-handed compliment:
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Nathaniel Burwell, 1818:
"Music is invaluable where a person has an ear. Where they have not, it should not be attempted."
Oscar Wilde's opnion of Wagner:
"I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. This is a great advantage."
Oscar Levant on the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr.:
"It must have been done by music critics."
Samuel Pepys, Diary:
"Music and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is."
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903:
"Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned."
W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1892:
"Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Hate-Song:
"A hater he came and sat by a ditch,
And he took an old cracked lute;
And he sang a song that was more of a screech
'Gainst a woman that was a brute."
S. T. Coleridge regarding a Volunteer singer:
"Swans sing before they die -
'twere no bad thing
Did certain persons die before they sing"
Beaumarchais, in The Barber of Seville, 1784:
"Today when something is not worth saying, they sing it."
Sidney Smith's definition of music:
"...the only cheap and unpunished rapture on earth."
Oscar Wilde, in Impressions of America, "Leadville":
"Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best."
Robert Browning, in Up at a Villa - Down in the City:
"Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife;
No keeping one's haunches still: it's the greatest pleasure in life."
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