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Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.

Leonard Bernstein

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Leonard Bernstein
Age: 72 †
Born: 1918
Born: August 25
Died: 1990
Died: October 14
Associate Professor
Composer
Conductor
Film Score Composer
Musicologist
Pianist
Lawrence
Massachusetts
Louis Bernstein
Age
Melancholy
Suffering
Belongs
Spirit
Intensity
Hovers
Great
Ages
Combines
Even
Tragic
Lyric
Love
Universal
Mozart
Compassion
Improvisation
Greater
Serenity

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
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Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist it is a gift we all share to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.
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I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
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Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
Leonard Bernstein
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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
Leonard Bernstein
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Leonard Bernstein
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Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
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You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.
Leonard Bernstein