The Sublime

"Haydn romantically apprehends the humanity in human life; he is more congenial to the majority. Mozart takes as his province the superhuman, magical quality residing in the inner self. Beethoven’s music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism."

---E.T.A. Hoffmann on Beethoven’s Fifth

“I shall never compose a symphony! You have no idea how someone like me feels when he hears such a giant marching behind him all the time.”

---Johannes Brahms

"When the sheer volume of sound is shatteringly intense, when the music’s progress is frequently interrupted, or when the textures are so complex that the imagination is stretched to its limits in a effort to follow what is going on, the music may well achieve the sublime."

---Christian Friedrich Michaelis, “On the Beautiful and Sublime in Music”