Claude Debussy Quotes - Page 2

When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity.

When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, "Let's go. He's starting to develop.

People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.

Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!

[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

What I am trying to do is something different - an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.

I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.

Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.

He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.

Music is in the space between the notes.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen.

If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.

The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.

Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps?

The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.

People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?

The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.