Etude Quotes

Corot spoiled the 'étude' [study] we admired so much when we saw it at his home, by redoing it in the studio. (Berthe Morisot)
The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The etude is a Romantic idea. It appeared in the early nineteenth century as a new genre: a short piece in which the musical interest is derived almost entirely from a single technical problem. A mechanical difficulty directly produces the music, its charm, and its pathos. Beauty and technique are united, but the creative stimulus is the hand, with its arrangement of muscles and tendons, its idiosyncratic shape. View quote
Charles Rosen
I do not think that any composer has ever asked for octave glissandi on the black keys, but there is a recording by Moriz Rosenthal of Chopin's Black-Key Etude in which he plays the short octave passage in both hands glissando: it hurts my hands just to think about it. View quote
Charles Rosen
Chopin is the true inventor of the concert etude, at least in the sense of being the first to give it complete artistic form-a form in which musical substance and technical difficulty coincide. View quote
Charles Rosen
Only once in Chopin's music is there a direct reference to Bach, and that is, appropriately, at the beginning of his only educational work, the two sets of Etudes, Op. 10 and 25, and the three Nouvelles Etudes for Moscheles. In the first Etude, Op. 10, in C major, we find a modernized version of the Prelude no. 1 of the Well-Tempered Keyboard... View quote
Charles Rosen