Music with Ease > Opera > Opera Quotes > Georges Bizet Quotes

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I want to do nothing chic, I want to have ideas before beginning a piece.
-- Bizet, letter to Charles Gounod, 1858

Let us have fantasy, boldness, unexpectedness, enchantment -- above all, tenderness, morbidezza!
-- Bizet, letter to Edmond Galabert, quoted in W Dean, Bizet (1975)

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
-- Bizet, letter to Edmond Galabert, 1866

Take the Spanish airs and mine out of the score, and there remains nothing to Bizet's credit but the sauce that masks the fish.
-- Charles Gounod (1818-93) on the premiere of Carmen, 1875, quoted in W Dean, Bizet (1975)

This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and yet it retains a popular appeal.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), quoted in C Headington, The Bodley Head History of Music (1974)


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Author: David Paul Wagner
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