Music with Ease > Classical Music Quotes > Johannes Brahms Quotes

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The classical composer par excellence of the present day, who free from any provincialism of expression or national dialect... writes for the whole world and for all time -- a giant, lofty and unapproachable -- Johannes Brahms
-- Edward Elgar, 1886

I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! I annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, Raff is a giant, not to speak of Rubenstein, who afterall is a live and important human being, while Brahms is chaotic and absolutely dried-up stuff.
-- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, diary, 1886

The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary... He is the most wanton of composers... Only his wantonness is not vicious; it is that of a great baby... rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.
-- George Bernard Shaw, 1893

Brahms is just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician, with the brains of a third rate village policeman.
-- George Bernard Shaw, 1893

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Take Brahms: the product of the misty landscapes of north Germany, his works are full of groping, dreaminess and introspection. Mist gives a sense of infinity; it may be only two feet deep but equally it may cover the world, there is no knowing.
-- Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Symphony (1976)





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Author: David Paul Wagner
(David Paul Wagner on Google+)