What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn’t laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in “serious” music.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHThose who have ears to hear, will hear.
More Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes
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I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible; and if I don’t succeed, I consider it my own fault.
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He fell like a chicken into the soup.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Those who have ears to hear, will hear.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator. If a work doesn’t express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesn’t, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
I write music, it’s performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn’t need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH -
I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH