65 Quotes by Thomas Beecham

"Have you heard any Stockhausen?" Beecham was asked. "No, but I believe I have stepped in some."

The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.

I find brass bands have a melancholy sound. All right out of doors, of course – fifty miles away. Like bagpipes, they turn what had been a dream into a public nuisance.

Try everything once, except folk dancing and incest.

Elgar’s first symphony is the musical equivalent of St Pancras Railway Station.

The bagpipes sound exactly the same when you have finished as when you started.

If an opera cannot be played by an organ grinder, it’s not going to achieve immortality.

The sound of a harpsichord – two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.

They are quite hopeless – drooling, driveling, doleful, depressing, dropsical drips.