COLLECTED BY CAROLINE MATHER LATHROP.
If fertility be a distinguishing mark of genius, then Franz Schubert is a genius of the highest order. Whatever he felt flowed forth in music.
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Experience has proved that the composer is not usually the finest and most interesting performer of his own works.
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He is a good musician who understands the score without the music and the music without the score.
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I love not the men whose lives are not in unison with their works.
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At last they hear the grass growing in Haydn’s “Creation.”
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Music resembles chess. The queen (melody) has the most power, but the king (harmony) turns the scale.
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Warn the youth who composes. Fruit that ripens too early falls before its time. The young mind must often unlearn theory before it can be put in practice.
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It is not a good thing to have acquired too much facility in any occupation.
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Equal forces counterbalance each other. Unequal forces betray their varying weight.
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The cultivated musician may study a Madonna by Raphael, the painter a symphony by Mozart, with equal advantage. Yet more: in the sculptor the actor’s art becomes fixed, the actor transforms the sculptor’s work into living forms, the painter turns a poem into a painting, the musician sets a picture to music.
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He who is anxious to preserve his originality is in danger of losing it.
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Do not forestall time; give the old master as a study to the young, but do not expect them to carry plainness and simplicity to the verge of affectation. Teach them to make an intelligent use of modern technicalities.
