Music with Ease > Classical Music Quotes > Frédéric Chopin Quotes

I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me.
-- Frédéric Chopin, quoted in Arthur Headley, Chopin (1947)

Hats off, gentlemen -- a genius!
-- Robert Schumann, 1831

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.
-- Oscar Wilde, 1891

She had learned in her childhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately -- with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of exquisite agony -- to clutch one's heart.
-- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913-27)

I love the angelic in his figure, which reminds me of Shelley: the peculiarly and very mysteriously veiled, unapproachable, withdrawing, unadventurous flavour of his being, that not wanting to know, that rejection of material experience, the sublime incest of his fantastically delicate and seductive art.
-- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947)