The Prague Sonata Quotes

“Had she simply been swept away by Irena’s story and the beauty of the work? Was it no more than a curiosity, a secondary scrap floating along on the clogged river of human ideas already overflowing with culture’s castoffs? She couldn’t help but feel a tinge of shame about the melodramatic thoughts chasing around in her head.”
― Bradford Morrow, The Prague Sonata

“Metacognition,”
― Bradford Morrow, The Prague Sonata

“she told him she’d grown up in a household where music was the religion and composers were its saints. Cantatas were chapels. Pavanes were prayer. Fugues were the firmament and God existed in every note.”
― Bradford Morrow, The Prague Sonata

“I know the Commies were choirboys by comparison—the Nazis at least had a modicum of appreciation for the art they plundered during their days here.”
― Bradford Morrow, The Prague Sonata

“Artur Schnabel, one of the towering pianists of the twentieth century. Modified in tone but not spirit from Schnabel’s interview remarks in Chicago the same year Germany surrendered to the Allies. She also knew this was about as high a compliment as Paul Mandelbaum was capable of making. Schnabel’s performances of the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas were possibly the only thing her mentor was capable of carrying on about ad nauseam. You were never going to enter his pantheon of star pupils unless you gave yourself over, heart and soul, to Schnabel’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Klaviersonaten and the virtuoso’s idea that the greatest music was that which is “better than it can be performed.”
― Bradford Morrow, The Prague Sonata