Louis Roney: Bach vs. bananas

“I would far rather play Chiquita Banana, and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve,” said Xavier Cugat. Cugat, a Latin American bandleader whose specialty was collecting pretty women, gauged his musical career by mundane results. The subject of music has inspired many diverse and fascinating quotes from many diverse and fascinating people.

William F. Buckley Jr., a true devotee of classical music, chose Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto” as his broadcast’s identifying theme. Buckley said, “Life can’t be all bad when for $10 you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for the rest of your life.”

Napoleon said, “Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and it is that art to which the legislator ought to bestow greatest encouragement.” In the French budget did Napoleon put his argent where his bouche was?

“I must study politics and war,” wrote American President John Adams, “so that my sons have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy ... in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, and music.”

Sergei Prokofiev declared, “There are still so many beautiful things to be said in the key of C major.”

Dimitri Mitropoulos, the conductor with whom I made my singing debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, once said to an interviewer, “I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter the cage with a book on how to tame lions?”

Famed old curmudgeon Arturo Toscanini stopped a rehearsal of his NBC Symphony to say this to a trumpeter in the orchestra, “God is telling me how this music should sound, but you are standing in the way!”

The great English conductor Sir John Barbirolli said to an audience, “You know why conductors live so long? Because we perspire so much.”

Richard Strauss was a famed conductor as well as one of the greatest composers. He told an orchestra, “Gentlemen, I would ask of you who are married to play this phrase as if you were engaged.”

“Bed is the poor man’s opera,” goes an old Italian proverb.

Great Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini may have been kidding when he said, “Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be, if there were no singers!”

Danish Wagner heldentenor Lauritz Melchior warned singers, “Regard your voice as capital in the bank. When you go to sing, do not draw upon your bank account. Sing on your interest and your voice will last.”

Beethoven said, “Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived ... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.” As he lay dying, Beethoven pointed to his collection of Handel’s compositions and said, “There lies the truth.”

Thomas Jefferson called music, “The favorite passion of my soul.”

Silence can be musical, of course, as William Wordsworth was saying in this line, “The music in my heart I bore long after it was heard no more.”

Or, as great mime Marcel Marceau put it, “Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

The relative immortality of music is incontrovertible.

Albert Einstein noted of Mozart’s music, “Never did Mozart write for eternity, and it is precisely for this reason that much of what he wrote is for eternity.”

When his friend and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner died, composer Frederick Loewe wrote the following words, which were read at Lerner’s funeral, “It won’t be long before we’re writing together again. I just hope they have a decent piano up there.”

The great Russian pianist and composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff, wrote, “Music is enough for a lifetime. But a lifetime is not enough for music.”

Composers often admire each other openly. Mozart knew a good thing when he heard it: “Keep an eye on that young man. Someday he will make a big splash in the world.” P.S.: The “young man” was Ludwig van Beethoven.

David W. Barber cracked, “Mozart is just God’s way of making the rest of us feel insignificant.”

Jascha Heifetz, the supreme violinist of his time, was a Russian who lived in Westwood Village, Cali. Heifetz once commented, “I occasionally play works by contemporary composers for two reasons: First, to discourage the composer from writing any more, and secondly to remind myself how much I love Beethoven.”

Mark Twain wrote after a trip to Germany, “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”

Pianist Joseph Hoffmann and violinist Mischa Elman sat together in Carnegie Hall at 15-year-old violinist Jascha Heifetz’s debut. After Heifetz’s first group, Elman said, “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?”

Hoffmann’s famous retort was, “Not for pianists!”