Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, baptised as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth27 January 1756
CitySalzburg, Austria
CountryAustria
Patience and tranquility of mind contribute more to cure our distempers as the whole art of medicine
It is a mistake to think that the price of my art has become easy to me.
For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!... A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not - but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes - bad, if he always stays in the same place.
To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.
My great grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.
I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician....
People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
One must not make oneself cheap here -- that is a cardinal point -- or else one is done. Whoever is most impertinent has the best chance.
Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
When I am . . . traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly.
My subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and define, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statute, at a glance.
My fatherland has always the first claim on me.
I write [music] as a sow piddles.