Quotations

Much of Paul Dupré's experience in composing and philosophy of music can be summarized by the following well-known quotations:

“Melody is the essence of music.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results. The final aim and reason of all music is nothing other than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the spirit.”
― Johann Sebastian Bach

“Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.”
― Hector Berlioz

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
― Frederic Chopin

“The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.”
― Felix Mendelssohn

“Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.”
― Claude Debussy

“There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original.”
― Joseph Haydn

“Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, except, possibly two.”
― Frederic Chopin

“The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.”
― W.H. Auden

“Forgive me, Majesty. I am a vulgar man! But I assure you, my music is not.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.”
― Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

“It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“I like good company, but I like hard work still better.”
― Camille Saint-Saens

“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.”
― Sergei Rachmaninoff

“If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.”
― Jean Sibelius

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”
― Leopold Stokowski

“Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.”
― Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

“Of course I have used dissonance in my time, but there has been too much dissonance. Bach used dissonance as good salt for his music. Others applied pepper, seasoned the dishes more and more highly, till all healthy appetites were sick and until the music was nothing but pepper.”
― Sergei Prokofiev

“Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic.”
― Jean Sibelius

“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”
― Richard Strauss