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Letters of the great composers: 14 moving, funny and inspiring quotations from the documents they left behind
Many of the great composers were prolific letter writers and the letters they left behind – to friends, patrons, siblings and lovers – are a fascinating insight into some of the greatest people who ever lived.
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1. Beethoven
"My thoughts go out to you, my immortal beloved… I can live only wholly with you or not at all."
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2. Mendelssohn
"I lie under apple-trees and huge oaks, I eat strawberries with my coffee, at dinner and supper."
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3. Schubert
"There can be scarcely anything more agreeable than to enjoy the green country on an evening after a hot summer's day. My heart warmed within me."
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4. Mahler
"Today I took my breakfast on the veranda. There's nothing like it on Earth."
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5. Mozart
"An astonishing number of kisses are flying about! I see a whole crowd of them. Ha! Ha! I have just caught three — They are delicious… I kiss you millions of times." - To Constanze Mozart, September 1790
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6. Janáček
"I hear music constantly in the empty silence, while the intellect is still and all emotional strings are relaxed."
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7. Elgar composer letter
"Some day the press will awake to the fact that the living centre of music in Great Britain… is not London but somewhere further North."
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8. Berlioz
"Sometimes, I would station myself in the midst of a landscape in harmony with my mood, and some passage from the Aeneid, would come back to me."
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9. Tchaikovsky
"The thought that this paper is going to be in your hands fills me with joy and brings tears to my eyes."
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10. Beethoven
"Oh! how happy should I now be, had I my full sense of hearing."
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11. Brahms
"I wish I could write to you as tenderly as I love you and tell you all the good things that I wish you. You are so infinitely dear to me, dearer than I can say."
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12. Elgar
"I always said God was against art and I still believe it."
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13. Prokofiev
"In the afternoon I went for a solitary skate... A light drizzle came on; the ice gleamed, producing a watery reflection of the trees, the sky and my flying figure."
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14. Debussy
"Noël! Noël! The bells are cracked. Noël! Noël! They have wept too long!"
