No Poem Is Intended For The Reader, No Picture For The Beholder, No Symphony For The Listener.
From The Glow Of Enthusiasm I Let The Melody Escape. I Pursue It. Breathless I Catch Up With It. It Flies Again, It Disappears, It Plunges Into A Chaos Of Diverse Emotions. I Catch It Again, I Seize It, I Embrace It With Delight... I Multiply It By Modulations, And At Last I Triumph In The First Theme. There Is The Whole Symphony.
The Deeper Men Go Into Life, The Deeper Is Their Conviction That This Life Is Not All. It Is An Unfinished Symphony. A Day May Round Out An Insect's Life, And A Bird Or A Beast Needs No Tomorrow. Not So With Him Who Knows That He Is Related To God And Has Felt The Power Of An Endless Life.
Elgar's First Symphony Is The Musical Equivalent Of St Pancras Railway Station.
Maxims In Times Of Danger Are Useless, Experience Is Incommunicable. The Knotted Strands Of Life, Desire, Assumptions, And Moral Codes Cannot Be Unsnarled; They Can Only Be Cut, Which Is What Happens When An Air Raid Occurs, With A Silencing Fortissimo Like The Finale Of A Beethoven Symphony.
You Invest Into The Future, And That's How Young People Become Human In Best Sense Of It - Through The Great Experience Of Listening A Müller Symphony Or To See A Great Play By Tennessee Williams, Experience Something In A Ballet, In A Film.
A Man Must Pay The Fiddler. In My Case It So Happened That A Whole Symphony Orchestra Often Had To Be Subsidized.
Everything Will Pass, And The World Will Perish But The Ninth Symphony Will Remain.
I Have Been Told That A Young Would-be Composer Wrote To Mozart Asking Advice About How To Compose A Symphony. Mozart Responded That A Symphony Was A Complex And Demanding Form And It Would Be Better To Start With Something Simpler. The Young Man Protested, 'but, Herr Mozart, You Wrote Symphonies When You Were Younger Than I Am Now.' Mozart Replied, 'i Never Asked How.
Although, I Am Proud Of All My Symphonies As They All Have Something Special To Say, My Particular Favourite Is The Fifth. As The Great Mahler Expert Donald Mitchell Said That If Mahler Had Written Another Symphony, It Would Have Been My Fifth!
You Know How It Is In The Symphony When You Are Listening To The Symphony, The Last Notes Die Away, And There's Often A Beat Of Silence In The Auditorium Before The Applause Begins. It's A Very Full And Pregnant Silence. Now Theology Should Bring Us To Live Into That Silence, Into That Pregnant Pause.
