Wine for Beethoven was symbolic. It was something that would bring everyone around the table to eat and drink and be equals.

The observation is often made that political conservatives do not have anything much to say about the arts, but that is not the whole truth.

Revolution has been the slogan and banner for generations of creative idealists. But they seem more concerned with a love of transgression than of life.

Counterpoint in music is like rhyme in poetry: it holds disparate things together in a unity, and at the same time it shows that unity is not simple but composed.

“Now we shall get rid of the weight of dead men’s thought, which has hitherto pressed so heavily on the living intellect.”

All the concrete, busy activity leading up to the performance is not the music, but only its production apparatus.

The hero of Robert Reilly’s generous and beautifully written book is beauty.

The sort of art that lives eternally is that which captures astonishing, spine-chilling, breathtaking, transforming beauty.

Wine for Beethoven was symbolic. It was something that would bring everyone around the table to eat and drink and be equals.

I remember seeing the Indian women with babies wrapped about them quietly contemplating Beethoven’s 7th.

“The only way you’re going to solve these problems is to tear down that house and build something half the size or less.”

When art goes wrong, we get a philistine welter of empty prettiness or an arid desert of conceptualism.

There will always be a type that can’t reconcile himself to the fact that classical music will always be a minority taste.