5 Modest Mussorgsky Quotes

Modest Mussorgsky quotes

1. My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.

2. In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.

3. I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera.

4. Sounds and ideas are hanging in the air;I am devouring them and stuffing myself.A comment he wrote after viewing an exhibition of Viktor Hartmann's drawings and paintings which inspired his suite Pictures at an Exhibition

1. And another thing about German symphonic development. I tell you, our cold kvass soup is a horror to the Germans, and yet we eat it with pleasure. And their cold cherry soup is a horror to us, and yet it sends a German into ecstacy. In short, symphonic development is just like German philosophy and soup-all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with some reasoning.