Jan Swafford > Quotes

“Perhaps an eternal law of art is that, for everything discovered, something of value is forgotten.”
― Jan Swafford, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music

“What elevates one and not another to the level of genius is not only talent and ambition and luck, but a gift for turning everything to the purpose. ... Perhaps that is a common element in the story of genius: beyond talent and ambition and luck, in some degree you have to be forcibly booted out of everyday life and everyday goals. In any case, it was like that with Brahms. The fulfillment of love was denied him so that other things might take wing.”
― Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

“There’s something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“We tend to listen to Mozart with ears trained by Beethoven, and that’s not the best way to listen to Mozart.”
― Jan Swafford, Mozart: The Reign of Love

“Art is free,” he said, “and is not to be diminished by any chains of craftsmanship.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“ONE CRITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS THAT ART escaped from religion and into the larger world.”
― Jan Swafford, Mozart: The Reign of Love

“In those days, the pursuit of music was perceived in a pair of dichotomies. Listeners were divided into amateurs and connoisseurs, performers into dilettanti and virtuosi. As in C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard sonatas for Kenner und Liebhaber, composers generally wrote with those divisions in mind. In 1782, Mozart wrote his father about his new concertos, “[H]ere and there connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; the non-connoisseurs cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”35 That defined the essentially populist attitude of what came to be called the Classical style: composers should provide something for everybody, at the same time gearing each work for its setting, whether it was the more intimate and complex chamber music played by enthusiasts in private homes, or public pieces for theater and larger concerts, which were written in a more straightforward style.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop.”
― Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

“He served humankind but never understood people, and though he yearned with all his heart for love and companionship, year after year he could bear humanity less and less in the flesh. His”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“In those days, private houses were the primary venue where secular music was heard. Public concerts in large halls were less common, largely reserved for orchestral and large choral works.40 From childhood on, Beethoven made his reputation as a performer mainly in the setting of house music, and that situation hardly changed through his career. Solo pieces and chamber music, in other words, were played in chambers, much of the time by amateur musicians for audiences of family and friends. Programs were a mélange of genres and media; a concerto might be followed by a solo piece, followed by an aria, the musicians alternately playing and listening. The audience typically wandered in and out of the room, sometimes chatted and played cards.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“On the other side of the misery of his training, there was the ecstasy of music itself. When he escaped from his father’s regime and found better teachers and discovered his own ambitions, the teenage Beethoven still sought solitude, hours when he could be alone with music and pore over his own creations. Even though he was performing constantly in public, the rest of the world and everybody in it could not reach him in that solitude. Music was the one extraordinary thing in a sea of the disappointing and ordinary. Reared as he was in a relentless discipline, instinctively responsive to music as he was, the boy never truly learned to understand the world outside music. Nobody ever really demanded that of him until, disastrously, near the end of his life. Nor did he ever really understand love. He could perceive the world and other people only through the prism of his own consciousness, judging them in the unforgiving terms he judged himself.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“The situation is desperate,” runs an old Viennese saying, “but not serious.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“In the Eroica and other pieces of his middle years, Beethoven hailed the enlightened leader, the benevolent despot, the military spirit. Now for him the military spirit is nothing but destruction. By the end of this section the bugles are raging, the drums roaring, the choir crying Dona pacem! in terror. Now we understand what Beethoven meant by “prayer for inner and outer peace.” The inner peace is that of the spirit. The outer peace is in the world. The fear and trembling in the Missa solemnis is not the fear of losing salvation in eternity; it is the human, secular fear of violence and chaos.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown." Maria van Beethoven (Beethoven's mom)”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“In its dream of the triumph of reason and science, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century failed in its hope of sweeping away old legends and superstitions like these—partly because the next generation, the Romantics, would condemn the reign of reason and embrace the ancient, the wild and mysterious, the mingling of fear and awe they called the sublime.   In”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Schubert had been one of the first composers to groan, “Who can do anything after Beethoven?”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Whatever is difficult," Beethoven would write, "is good.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if ever, by the leaper. Life seems to me an improvisation.”
― Jan Swafford

“locking the little scamp in the basement.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“munificence.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“concert. It was a benefit for the string-playing”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“Counterpoint is the joining of disciplined science with expressive art: to superimpose beautiful and logical melodies whose combination also, magically, creates beautiful and logical harmonic progressions.”
― Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

“The little Prelude in C Major that starts the set is one of Bach’s most famous and beloved pieces (it was reportedly a favorite of his, too), yet what appears to be a simple rippling up and down on chords disguises a complex interweaving of melodies.”
― Jan Swafford, Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music

“If I were in a place where people had ears to hear, hearts to feel, and had some small understanding of Musique, if they had a modicum of taste, I should heartily laugh about all these things; but as it is, I am living among brutes and beasts as far as Musique is concerned; but how can it be otherwise; after all, that’s precisely what they are in their behavior, sentiments, and Passions.”12 And further: “What annoys me most of all in this business is that our French gentlemen have only improved their goût to the extent that they can now listen to good stuff as well. But to expect them to realize that their own music is bad or at least to notice the difference—Heaven preserve us! And their singing!”
― Jan Swafford, Mozart: The Reign of Love

“He noted that with women Brahms had a habit of straight-faced teasing that was often misinterpreted—especially by Clara, who generally missed the joke and waxed indignant.”
― Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

“We know for a fact that many of the secret societies . . . are not, as they claim, dedicated solely to rational enlightenment and practical humanity. Rather, their intention is nothing less than to undermine the power and prestige of the monarchs, encourage liberation movements, and sway the people’s opinion by means of a secret ruling elite.”
― Jan Swafford, Mozart: The Reign of Love

“Performing regularly at the Breunings for a salon of knowledgeable and admiring listeners, Beethoven played Haydn and Mozart and Bach, his own pieces, improvisations. Often he was asked to improvise a character portrait of one of the Breuning circle.11 That came naturally to him; Christian Neefe had taught him that music was modeled not only on forms but also on passions and characters. Young Beethoven joined in the ongoing dialogue over the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. He read books he heard spoken of in the house: Homer and Plutarch and Shakespeare, the current German poems of Klopstock, and works of the young Goethe and Schiller. He soaked up the Aufklärung ferment that was a constant presence.12 In”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“From early on, Ludwig was a pianist rather than a harpsichordist, becoming one of the first generation to grow up as pure pianists from close to the beginning of their studies. Van den Eeden may also have taught the boy his first lessons in thoroughbass, giving him a foundation in harmonic practice by way of learning to read the numerical figures that indicate the chords to be played above a bass line.31 Most solo works of that time consisted simply of a melody and figured bass, the keyboardist improvising an accompaniment from the given harmonies. Learning the art of harmony via thoroughbass was a foundation of both composition and improvisation.”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

“[Later Beethoven said, “Only art and science can raise man to the level of the divine.”]”
― Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph