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Schumann: 'Play conscientiously the fugues of good masters, above all those of Sebastian Bach. Let The Well-Tempered Clavier be your daily bread.Then you will certainly become a solid musician' ('Maxims for Home and Life' Haus und Lebensregdn, 1848)



Hector Berlioz: 'There is one God - Bach - and Mendelssohn is his prophet'



Paul Hindemith: 'I don't know how, with no vibrato, Bach could have so many sons.'



A village organist on finding Bach playing his organ: 'This can only be the devil or Bach himself'.

A member of the Arnstadt Council in 1705: 'If Bach continues to play in this way, the organ will be ruined in two years, or most of the congregation will be deaf.'



Goethe: 'It is as though eternal harmony were conversing with itself, as it may have happened in God's bosom shortly before He created the world.'



Beethoven: 'Not brook but sea should be his name'.



Schubert: 'Johann Sebastian Bach has done everything completely, he was a man through and through.'



George Bernard Shaw: 'Bach belongs not to the past, but to the future - perhaps the near future.'



Debussy: 'A benevolent god, to whom musicians should offer a prayer before setting to work so that they may be preserved from mediocrity'.



Thomas Beecham: 'Too much counterpoint - and what is worse, Protestant counterpoint'.



Chopin: 'Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars...Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit...I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man.'



Schumann: 'Music owes as much to Bach as religion to its founder'.



Saint-Saens: 'What gives Sebastian Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression. As high as their expresson may soar, their musical form remains supreme and all-sufficient.'



Michael Torke: 'Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?'



Nina Simone: 'Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music.'



Brahms: 'Study Bach, there you will find everything'.



Gounod: 'If all the music written since Bach's time should be lost, it could be reconstructed on the foundation which Bach laid'.



Mahler: 'In Bach the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.'



Wagner: '...the most stupendous miracle in all music!'



Douglas Adams: 'I don't think a greater genius has walked the earth. Of the 3 great composers Mozart tells us what it's like to be human, Beethoven tells us what it's like to be Beethoven and Bach tells us what it's like to be the universe.'



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