Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

  • In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter, is duty bound to serve Man, the people. He must beautify life and defend it. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art might consciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future.
  • There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C Major.
  • I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions.
  • My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.
  • Formalism is music that people don’t understand at first hearing.
  • Of course I have used dissonance in my time, but there has been too much dissonance. Bach used dissonance as good salt for his music. Others applied pepper, seasoned the dishes more and more highly, till all healthy appetites were sick and until the music was nothing but pepper.
  • I want nothing better, more flexible or more complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purposes.
  • I strenuously object to the very word “grotesque” which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea. . . I would prefer my music to be described as “Scherzo-ish” in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo – Whimsicality, laughter, mockery.
  • It seemed to me that had Haydn lived in our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time. That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the classical style. And when I saw that my idea was beginning to work, I called it the Classical Symphony.
  • My mother had to explain that one couldn’t compose a Liszt rhapsody because it was a piece of music that Liszt himself had already composed.