Alban Berg Quotations

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge.

Why is Schoenberg's Music so Hard to Understand?

I am proud that [I was] , , , enabled to guide this great talent . . . towards the superb fulfillment of its individual potentialities, towards the greatest independence.

I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

The best magic always results from ecstasies of logic.

I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy.