Saint-Saens on Bach and Mozart

“What gives Sebastian Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression. As high as their expression may soar, their musical form remains supreme and all-sufficient.”

– Camille Saint-Saëns, from a letter to Camille Bellaigue, 1907
Cited in:
Fisk, Josiah (ed.) (1997) Composers On Music: Eight Centuries of Writings. Boston: Northeastern University Press, p.1443.


Posted

in

by


Featured Content

Abstraction XIII
Title: Abstraction XIII Composer: Greg Smith Performer: Greg Smith Product medium: MP3     Related products:     – Abstraction XIII (PDF score) Sample:
One Week
Title: One Week (silent film soundtrack) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score BACKGROUND: Film:        Directors: Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton        Starring: Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts, Sybil Seely        Date of release: 1920        Synopsis: A newly wed couple receive a generous […]
The illiterate of the future
“The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn.” -Alvin Toffler, American writer and futurist Cited at QuotationsBook
Searching for expression
When my students compose, I prefer them to be mistaken if they must make mistakes, but to remain natural and free rather than wishing to appear other than what they are. I remember a day when Stravinsky was dining here. He took his neighbor at the table by the lapels, violently! His neighbor crushed, said […]
Playing by the mood of the audience
Rachmaninoff sent fellow composer/pianist Medtner his Corelli Variations.  He wrote: I played them here about fifteen times, but of these fifteen performances, only one was good.  The others were sloppy.  I can't play my own compositions!  And it's so boring! Not once have I played these all in continuity.  I was guided by the coughing […]
Motion and art
“The statue is concentrated in one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas posses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know nothing of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time […]
A practice regime
After a year’s sabbatical in 1953, the pianist Horowitz found a routine and rebuilt his technique: I realized I had to work out new daily schedules for myself – so much time for study, for rest, for reflection, for exercise … Soon my days had a new rhythm, a new serenity.  Every day I start […]
Style
Baroque they are not
Between 1910 and 1938 the Austrian violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler produced some arrangements of works by Boccherini, Martini, Couperin, Vivaldi and Porpora. They were positively achieved by the crticis.  In 1935, Kreisler revealed that there were not arrangements at all, but in fact works which he had written from scratch.  Suddenly critic’s attitudes to the […]
Haydn’s audition
Karl Georg Reutter II was appointed choirmaster at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna in 1738.  The following year he went on tour to recruit choristers.  In the town of Hainburg, Joseph Haydn (at stage seven years of age) auditioned.  The contemporary biography Guiseppe Carpani recalled: Reutter gave him a tune to sing at sight. The […]