Music with Ease > Classical Music Quotes > Franz Schubert Quotes

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His character was a mixture of tenderness and coarseness, sensuality and candour, sociability and melancholy.
-- Johann Mayrhofer; quoted in Westrup, Schubert Music (1969)

Where other people keep diaries in which they record their momentary feelings, etc, Schubert simply kept sheets of music by him and confided his changing moods to them; and his soul being steeped in music, he put down notes when another man would resort to words.
-- Robert Schumann, letter to to Friedrich Wieck, 1829; quoted in Gal, The Musician's World (1965)

Such is the spell of of your emotional world that it very nearly blinds us to the greatness of your craftsmanship.
-- Franz Liszt

In his larger forms, Schubert is a wanderer. He likes to move at the edge of the precipice, and does so with the assurance of a sleepwalker. To wander is the Romantic condition; one yields to it enraptured, or is driven and plagued by the terror of finding no escape. More often than not, happiness is but the surface of despair.
-- Alfred Brendel, 'Schubert's Last Sonatas' , in: Music Sounded Out (1990)

A rare genius whose innocent yearning for affection was expressed in music as pure as spring water.
-- Valerie Grove, Laurie Lee: The Well-loved Stranger (1999)





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Author: David Paul Wagner
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