Top 101 Beethoven Quotes

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

There are different people who got me into music, but what I liked about Beethoven is that even when I didn’t understand it or it was too long, there’s still something about it that drove me to it. Then it got me excited about actually learning music, like a theory of it.

On the night of Brexit, while some people were celebrating and others were having wakes, I stayed in and played Beethoven, his quartets mainly, into the small hours of the morning.

I think a great piece, whenever it was written, gets under our skin, makes us feel something. That’s what Beethoven was trying to do.

If Beethoven and Bach hooked up with Mozart and made a band, they could be a distant runner up to The D.

One of my dogs is in the movie Beethoven’s 2nd.

People who go to concerts hear Beethoven’s symphonies hundreds of times, but ‘Star Trek’ is recorded, so it’s not played all the time.

I think that, as a person, Beethoven talks to everyone in different ways.

I grew up listening to my parents’ albums. Many of them were either classical – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – or easy listening, like Mantovani. I loved the spectrum of emotions in classical music, from fortissimo to pianissimo. My early passion for classical made my drumming more musical later on.

I’d love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!

I would say that Beethoven’s late string quartets are the nearest to God that we’ll ever get.

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.

When I think of Chinese parents, I think of people who weep upon hearing Beethoven, but who can’t necessarily bring that joy to others.

There’s always blood on the carpet when I play Beethoven at the piano. I hate playing the piano! And it’s so hard to fight for Beethoven’s soul! But that’s what I have to do!

I think there are very few people that I would give the title of genius to, really, but Beethoven unquestionably is one of them.

When Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.

As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.

The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let’s call it, ‘collective unconscious’ of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wanted… to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.

The code of life is like a Beethoven symphony. We have not yet learned how to write music like that. But evolution does it very well. I am learning how to use evolution to compose new music.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

Anybody can build a building, putting some doors into it, but how many times have you been in a building that moves you to tears the way Beethoven’s ‘Eighth’ does?

I have no idea what was the first record I ever bought, but I think I asked my mom to buy me… um… a collection of Beethoven when I was a little girl because I became very addicted to his music. It might have been piano sonatas.

All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.

We soaked up everything from Beethoven to Chopin to Jimi Hendrix to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don’t want to live a grubby life.

After conducting Wagner, Beethoven’s triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn’t waste time waiting for inspiration.

There was one thing Beethoven didn’t do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn’t improvising.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

I grew up listening to Beethoven and old jazz singers like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Anita O’Day. But those were, like, the only women I listened to – I hated women pop singers.

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

As for my relationship to Beethoven, I admire people who can say what they really think. It’s as though he’s saying, ‘That’s how I feel about the world, and I don’t care what people may say.’ His music is pure and honest. Beethoven never pretends to be anybody else.

Even if you’re playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you’ve got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

Beethoven’s reputation is based entirely on gossip. The middle Beethoven represents a supreme example of a composer on an ego trip.

I play the piano and have been playing since I was 7, mainly classical Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart.

I don’t take much from my own father, because he was a very austere, quiet, private man who would come home from work, go to his parlour and play Beethoven on his piano.

I think, bad times, I sit down and I play – there’s definitely certain songs that touch in certain ways. I go back to ‘Moonlight Sonata’ by Beethoven; that usually takes care of everything.

When my dad went to college to get his master’s from Loyola, he was playing Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven. But he played all that New Orleans stuff, too. I would go with my dad to gigs, pick up the piano and the speakers, and I would be like his roadie.

Beethoven and Beatles, Mozart and Michael Jackson, Paganini and Prince – I like them all.

Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don’t understand why this happens in the movie industry.

Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

Bach and Beethoven, all of them, they had to write something to please the upper structure, those with money and power.

Beethoven had a great look. It was very much about the drama of appearance.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.

When you’re a kid, Beethoven is Beethoven, but as I’ve grown older, my astonishment at the sheer inventiveness of the man has increased, and I have an appreciation that I didn’t have when I was in my 20s.

The man on the street, he knows who Beethoven is, he knows who Mozart is.

I listen to either romantic classical music, Brahms or Beethoven or something like Mozart, or I go all the way contemporary and listen to Metallica or Adele, Radiohead, jazz, whatever it is that is completely opposite.

Beethoven’s symphonies are not ‘relaxing.’ They are the most exciting things that have ever been created by a human being.

In science, if you don’t do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn’t compose the ‘Ninth Symphony,’ no one else before or after is going to compose the ‘Ninth Symphony’ that he composed; no one else is going to paint ‘Starry Night’ by van Gogh.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.

I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I’m listening to more modern composers who I can’t even name. But since I’m constantly doing music, it’s difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.

Mozart, Beethoven – how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.