You can't go home and listen to Chopin, and just use it.
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.
It was an unforgettable picture to see Chopin sitting at the piano like a clairvoyant, lost in his dreams; to see how his vision communicated itself through his playing, and how, at the end of each piece, he had the sad habit of running one finger over the length of the plaintive keyboard, as though to tear himself forcibly away from his dream.
I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude. '
It's important to play the pieces that you feel you can play well. It was always my dream to play Bach - my first love and fascination - Chopin, and Szymanowski.
If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.
You [Chopin] have in your fingers an orchestra of butterflies.
I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so its difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.
Liszt's so-called piano music is nothing but Chopin and brandy.
Chopin was an invalid, as you know, but his music was volcanic.
When you play Bach like Chopin, and Chopin like Bach, something good happens.
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.
Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
The Pole listening to Chopin listens to the voice of his whole race.
I'm definitely not a laptopmidiabelton guy. But there is a lot of music I like. I really like Bach organ music. I really like Chopin piano music. I really like Wendy Carlo's electronic music. I really like Miles Davis and John Mclaughlin jazz style. So I'm not only an old-school rocker, but I have to admit that I'm going to be listening to The Doors, Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Bob Dylan many times a week.
On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there's no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.
Chopin has done for the piano what Schubert has done for the voice.
We need more bodies, 'cause it's not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already. --Chopper Jim Chopin
