Berlioz Quotes

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its students." [Letter, November 1856]

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. —LOUIS-HECTOR BERLIOZ

It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him - that is, not liked but . . . how to put it . . . was interested, or whatever.

But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth? – Man governs it himself, – Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question. – Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years , but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem ... hem ... lung cancer ... – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — yes, cancer — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word —and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven. And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk – here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz – a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

time is an excellent teacher - unfortunately it kills all its pupils

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ...

Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.

The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.

The brick is neither here nor there,' interrupted the stranger in an imposing fashion, 'it never merely falls on someone's head from out of nowhere. In your case, I can assure you that a brick poses no threat whatsoever. You will die another kind of death." 'And you know just what that will be?' queried Berlioz with perfectly understandable irony, letting himself be drawn into a truly absurd conversation. 'And can you tell me what that is?' 'Gladly,' replied the stranger. He took Berlioz's measure as if intending to make him a suit and muttered something through his teeth that sounded like 'One, two.. Mercury in the Second House... the moon has set... six-misfortune...evening-seven...' Then he announced loudly and joyously, 'Your head will be cut off!

Hector Berlioz’s witty comment, “Time is the great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all of its students.

-A! Więc jest pan historykiem? - z szacunkiem i ogromną ulgą zapytał Berlioz. -Jestem historykiem – potwierdził uczony i dodał ni w pięć, ni w dziewięć: - Dziś wieczorem na Patriarszych Prudach wydarzy się nadzwyczaj interesująca historia.

Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.

Without those peak experiences our lives would be pretty dull and flat. Berlioz put it this way: A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.

Have just been run over by tram-car at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three pm come. Berlioz.

Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Il faut collectionner les pierres qu'on vous jette. C'est le début d'un piédestal.

He was dying all his life.

-Butelkę mineralnej – poprosił Berlioz. -Mineralnej nie ma – odpowiedziała kobieta w budce i z niejasnych powodów obraziła się.

Każdy z literatów pomyślał co innego. Berlioz: „Nie, to jednak cudzoziemiec!”, a Bezdomny: „O, cholera!...”.

I have just been cut in half by a streetcar at Patriarch's. Funeral Friday 3PM. Come. Berlioz

manic-depressive illness, we proposed to the executive director of the Philharmonic a program based on the lives and music of several composers who had suffered from the illness, including Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and Hugo Wolf.

Passionate subjects must be dealt with in cold blood.

It was a wicked game. “Homer,” says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. “The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart’s music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

There isn’t a single eastern religion,” said Berlioz, “in which, as a rule, a chaste virgin doesn’t give birth to a god. And without inventing anything new, in exactly the same way, the Christians created their Jesus, who in reality never actually lived. And it’s on that the main emphasis needs to be put...

Time is a great teacher, but ufortunately, it kills all its pupils...

Time is a great teacher. Too bad it kills all of its pupils.

...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.

The telegram read: Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarchs’ Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz. Maximilian Andreyevich was known, and deservedly so, as one of the cleverest men in Kiev. But even the cleverest man would be baffled by such a telegram. If a man could wire that he had been run over, he obviously was not dead. Then what was this about the funeral? Or was he hurt so badly that he knew he would die? That was possible, but how could he know with such precision the day and hour of his funeral? An amazing telegram!

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all pupils

Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills its pupils.

La vie sert à faire des opéras-comiques.

The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.

It was Haydn and Mozart who really cracked the sonata, but it was Beethoven who reinvented it, just as he reinvented the symphony. Bach was king of the Baroque; Mozart and Haydn were kings of the Classical; Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, and Berlioz were the great Romantics. Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner brought music into the twentieth century; Stravinsky and Schoenberg redefined harmony. But Beethoven was in a class of his own. He didn’t write music to praise God. He didn’t write it to earn a living. Beethoven wrote music because he had to.

Fresh proof of the risks you run in writing about players, and of the advisability of not standing to leeward of their self-esteem when one has had the misfortune to wound it in the slightest degree. When you criticize a singer, you do not have his colleagues up in arms against you. Indeed, they generally feel that you have not been severe enough. But the virtuoso instrumentalist who belongs to a well-known musical organization always claims that in criticizing him you are 'insulting' the whole institution, and though the contention is absurd he sometimes succeeds in making the other players believe it.

One evening we were exploring the Baths of Caracalla together, while debating the question of merit or demerit in human behaviour and its rewards in life. As I was propounding some outrageous thesis or another in answer to the strictly orthodox and pious views put forward by him, his foot slipped and the next moment he was lying in a bruised condition at the bottom of a steep ruined staircase. 'Look at that for divine justice,' I said, helping him onto his feet. 'I blaspheme, you fall.' This irreverence, accompanied by roars of laughter, apparently went to far, and thenceforth all religious arguments were banned.

It's evident that with Beethoven the Romantic Revolution had already begun, bringing with it the new Artist, the artist as Priest and Prophet. This new creator had a new self-image: he felt himself possessed of divine rights, of almost Napoleonic powers and liberties — especially the liberty to break rules and make new ones, to invent new forms and concepts, all in the name of greater expressivity. His mission was to lead the way to a new aesthetic world, confident that history would follow his inspirational leadership. And so there exploded onto the scene Byron, Jean Paul, Delacroix, Victor Hugo, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz — all proclaiming new freedoms. Where music was concerned, the new freedoms affected formal structures, harmonic procedures, instrumental color, melody, rhythm — all of these were part of a new expanding universe, at the center of which lay the artist's personal passions. From the purely phonological point of view, the most striking of these freedoms was the new chromaticism, now employing a vastly enriched palette, and bringing with it the concomitant enrichment of ambiguity. The air was now filled with volcanic, chromatic sparks. More and more the upper partials of the harmonic series were taking on an independence of their own, playing hide-and-seek with their sober diatonic elders, like defiant youngsters in the heyday of revolt.

en vérité il est très agréable de se réunir, de s’asseoir et de bavarder des intérêts publics. Parfois même je suis prêt à chanter de joie, quand je rentre dans la société et vois des hommes solides, sérieux, très bien élevés, qui se sont réunis, parlent de quelque chose sans rien perdre de leur dignité. De quoi parlent-ils ? ça c’est une autre question. J’oublie même, parfois, de pénétrer le sens de la conversation, me contentant du tableau seul. Mais jusqu’ici, je n’ai jamais pu pénétrer le sens de ce dont s’entretiennent chez nous les gens du monde qui n’appartiennent pas à un certain groupe. Dieu sait ce que c’est. Sans doute quelque chose de charmant, puisque ce sont des gens charmants. Mais tout cela paraît incompréhensible. On dirait toujours que la conversation vient de commencer ; comme si l’on accordait les instruments. On reste assis pendant deux heures et, tout ce temps, on ne fait que commencer la conversation. Parfois tous ont l’air de parler de choses sérieuses, de choses qui provoquent la réflexion. Mais ensuite, quand vous vous demandez de quoi ils ont parlé, vous êtes incapable de le dire : de gants, d’agriculture, ou de la constance de l’amour féminin ? De sorte que, parfois, je l’avoue, l’ennui me gagne. On a l’impression de rentrer par une nuit sombre à la maison en regardant tristement de côté et d’entendre soudain de la musique. C’est un bal, un vrai bal. Dans les fenêtres brillamment éclairées passent des ombres ; on entend des murmures de voix, des glissements de pas ; sur le perron se tiennent des agents. Vous passez devant, distrait, ému ; le désir de quelque chose s’est éveillé en vous. Il vous semble avoir entendu le battement de la vie, et, cependant, vous n’emportez avec vous que son pâle motif, l’idée, l’ombre, presque rien. Et l’on passe comme si l’on n’avait pas confiance. On entend autre chose. On entend, à travers les motifs incolores de notre vie courante, un autre motif, pénétrant et triste, comme dans le bal des Capulet de Berlioz. L’angoisse et le doute rongent votre coeur, comme cette angoisse qui est au fond du motif lent de la triste chanson russe : Écoutez... d’autres sons résonnent. Tristesse et orgie désespérées... Est-ce un brigand qui a entonné, là-bas, la chanson ? Ou une jeune fille qui pleure à l’heure triste des adieux ? Non ; ce sont les faucheurs qui rentrent de leur travail... Autour sont les forêts et les steppes de Saratov.

Se dice que el tiempo es un gran maestro; lo malo es que va matando a sus discípulos.

As a contrast to the Bach of pure music I present the Bach who is a poet and painter in sound. In his music and in his texts he expresses the emotional as well as the descriptive with great vitality and clarity. Before all else he aims at rendering the pictorial in lines of sound. He is even more tone painter than tone poet. His art is nearer to that of Berlioz than to that of Wagner. If the text speaks of drifting mists, of boisterous winds, of roaring rivers, of waves that ebb and flow, of leaves falling from the tree, of bells that toll for the dying, of the confident faith that walks with firm steps or the weak faith that falters, of the proud who will be debased and the humble who will be exalted, of Satan rising in rebellion, of angels on the clouds of heaven, then one sees and hears all this in his music. Bach has, in fact, his own language of sound. There are in his music constantly recurring rhythmical motives expressing peaceful bliss, lively joy, intense pain, or sorrow sublimely borne. The impulse to express poetic and pictorial concepts is the essence of music. It addresses itself to the listener's creative imagination and seeks to kindle in him the feelings and visions with which the music was composed. But this it can do only if the person who uses the language of sound possesses the mysterious faculty of rendering thoughts with a superior clarity and precision. In this respect Bach is the greatest of the great.

Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils. —Hector Berlioz

Le temps est un grand professeur, mais malheureusement il tue ses élèves.

A ty - mówił Berlioz do poety - bardzo dobrze i odpowiednio satyrycznie pokazałeś, na przykład, narodziny Jezusa, syna bożego, ale dowcip polega na tym, że jeszcze przed Jezusem narodziło się całe mnóstwo synów bożych, jak powiedzmy fenicki Adonis, frygijski Attis, perski Mitra.

La chance d'avoir du talent ne suffit pas ; il faut encore le talent d'avoir de la chance.

But I have long said adequately (in Beyond Good and Evil, section 256) where Wagner belongs and who are his closest relatives: the late French romantics, that high-flying and yet rousing manner of artists like Delacroix, like Berlioz, with a characteristic fond 8 of sickness, of incurability—all of them fanatics of expression, virtuosos through and through. Who was the first intelligent adherent of Wagner anywhere? Charles Baudelaire, who was also the first to understand Delacroix—that typical decadent in whom a whole tribe of artists recognized themselves—and perhaps he was also the last. What did I never forgive Wagner? That he condescended to the Germans—that he became reichsdeutsch.

He opened up a new world in music,” said French Romantic master Hector Berlioz, who idolized the deaf composer. “Beethoven is not human.”[23]

Time is a great teacher, But unfortunately, it kills all its pupils. —Hector Berlioz

Hector (1803-69), French composer; full name Louis-Hector Berlioz. Notable works: Les Troyens (opera, 1856-59), Symphonie fantastique (1830), and La Damnation de Faust (cantata, 1846). berm   n. a flat strip of land, raised bank, or terrace bordering a river or canal.    a path or grass strip beside a road.  an artificial ridge or embankment, e.g., as a defense against tanks.  a narrow space, esp. one between a ditch and the base of a parapet.  early 18th cent. (DENOTING A NARROW SPACE): from French berme, from Dutch berm. Ber·mu·da (also the Ber·mu·das)   a British crown colony made up of about 150 small islands about 650 miles (1,046 km) east of the coast of North Carolina; pop. 58,000; capital, Hamilton. Inhabited since 1609, it now has internal self-government.   Ber·mu·danadj. & n.Ber·mu·di·anadj. & n.  named after a Spanish sailor, Juan Bermúdez, who sighted the islands early in the 16th cent.

Alexandre Dumas, also in the audience, wrote that Shakespeare arrived in France with the “freshness of Adam’s first sight of Eden.” Fellow attendees Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, along with Berlioz and Dumas, would create works inspired by those seminal evenings. The Bard’s electrifying combination of profound human insight and linguistic glory would continue catapulting across national borders to influence poets, painters, and composers the world over, as no other writer has done. Yet the UCLA English department—like so many others—was more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics.

It is difficult to put into words what I suffered-the longing that seemed to be tearing my heart out by the roots, the dreadful sense of being alone in an empty universe, the agonies that thrilled through me as if the blood were running ice-cold in my veins, the disgust with living, the impossibility of dying. Shakespeare himself never described this torture; but he counts it, in Hamlet, among the terrible of all the evils of existence. I had stopped composing; my mind seemed to become feebler as my feelings grew more intense. I did nothing. One power was left me-to suffer.

Along with the figure of Liberty and the tricolored flag, the third revolutionary symbol to return with the Revolution of 1830 was the “Marseillaise,” the forty-year-old song that had been France’s national anthem before the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815. “And the music that was there then,” recalled the composer Hector Berlioz in his memoirs about the atmosphere in Paris in the aftermath of the July Days, “the songs, the harsh voices resounding through the streets—nobody who did not hear it can have an idea what it was like.” Each night crowds gathered under the windows of the Palais Royal to sing the “Marseillaise,” and Louis Philippe would go out on his balcony and beat time for the citizens’ chorus.

The dramatic strategy of the show provides a simple and effective means to blend melodrama with farce (which Sondheim claims as his “two favorite forms of theatre because … they are obverse sides of the same coin”).37 Starkly put, the show develops a pattern of first scaring the hell out of its audience and then rescuing the situation through humor, each time by introducing Mrs. Lovett into a situation saturated with Sweeney Todd’s wrenching angst. This scare-rescue pattern happens twice to great effect, at the beginning and end of Act I, but its real payoff is the devastating conclusion, where there is no comic rescue. The denial of this previous pattern greatly intensifies the darkness of the supremely bleak ending, making the show’s musical profile seem operatic to Broadway audiences even though, ironically in this respect, the denouement unfolds with only intermittent singing.38 But the musical dimension of the show is also deliberately operatic, as it interweaves, Wagner-like, a host of recurring motives, mostly related to each other through a common origin in the Dies Irae, from the Catholic requiem mass. The Dies Irae (literally, “Day of Wrath”; see example 7.1) was taken up as a symbol of death and retribution in music throughout the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth (the most important early such use was by Berlioz in his 1830 Symphonie fantastique). Most scene changes bring back “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” which includes both fast and slow versions of the Dies Irae (example 7.1) and builds up to a frenetic, obsessive chorus of “Sweeney, Sweeney.

The same picture can be seen even more starkly in classical music – the nineteenth century had Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Debussy, Berlioz, Weber, Verdi, Wagner, Mahler, Brahms… the list just goes on and on. In the early twentieth century there were a few leftovers in Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Richard Strauss and then… nothing.

A veces, a los músicos de cámara se nos olvida que la vida no siempre tiene una banda sonora de un Beethoven o de un Berlioz. A veces la vida nos golpea a ritmo de tango, o con la contundencia de un bolero o con la gracia de una ranchera. Y que en la mayoría de las ocasiones su intensidad puede traducirse por entre las líneas de una canción de Metallica, de Rammstein o de los Ramones.

Où est la vérité ? où est l’erreur ? partout et nulle part. Chacun a raison ; ce qui est beau pour l’un ne l’est pas pour l’autre, par cela seul que l’un a été ému et que l’autre est demeuré impassible, que le premier a éprouvé une vive jouissance et le second une grande fatigue. Que faire à cela ?.. rien.... mais c’est horrible ; j’aimerais mieux être fou et croire au beau absolu.

J’ai vu une chienne qui hurlait de plaisir en entendant la tierce majeure tenue en double corde sur le violon, elle a fait des petits sur qui la tierce, ni la quinte, ni la sixte, ni l’octave, ni aucun accord consonant ou dissonant, n’ont jamais produit la moindre impression. Le public, de quelque manière qu’il soit composé, est toujours, à l’égard des grandes conceptions musicales, comme cette chienne et ses chiens. Il a certains nerfs qui vibrent à certaines résonances, mais cette organisation, tout incomplète qu’elle soit, étant inégalement répartie et modifiée à l’infini, il s’ensuit qu’il y a presque folie à compter sur tels moyens de l’art plutôt que sur tels autres, pour agir sur lui ; et que le compositeur n’a rien de mieux à faire que d’obéir aveuglément à son sentiment propre, en se résignant d’avance à toutes les chances du hasard.