48 Great Quotes By Gustav Mahler On Love, Music, Life And More
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.
I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.
What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.
It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.
But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.
The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.
The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.
With the coming of spring, I am calm again.
When I have reached a summit, I leave it with great reluctance, unless it is to reach for another, higher one.
Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.
The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content.
I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.
Man lives in greatest pain
You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.
I beg of you... never assume an inner or an outer pose, never a disguise.
The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi.
What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.
To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.
The real art of conducting consists in transitions.
The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.
Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.
It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.
It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces.
In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage.
If I weren't the way I am, I shouldn't write my symphonies.
I hope you will no longer accuse me of a lack of delicacy. as I now count on your understanding.
I don't let myself get carried away by my own ideas - I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day.
Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos.
