Classical Composer

Dmitri Shostakovich

Music

1906–1975

"People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence."

🇬🇧Ralph Vaughan Williams

Music

1872–1958

"The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation."

🇫🇷Georges Bizet

Music

Romantic music

1838–1875

"Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!"

🇭🇺Franz Liszt

Music

Romantic music

1811–1886

"Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny."

🇦🇹Anton Webern

Music

1883–1945

"Music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing."

Antonín Dvořák

Music

Romantic music

1841–1904

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression – at least, not in the beginning – and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap."

🇪🇪Arvo Pärt

Music

b. 1935

"Pärt's cryptic remarks on his compositions orbit around the words 'silent' and 'beautiful'--minimal, by now almost imperiled associative notions, but ones which reverberate his musical creations."

Alexander Borodin

Music

1833–1887

"Music is a pastime, a relaxation from more serious occupations."

Anton Rubinstein

Music

1829–1894

"I think that with the death of Schumann and Chopin—‘finis musicae'.'’"

🇺🇸Arnold Schoenberg

Music

1874–1951

"There are no more geniuses, only critics."