Gioachino Rossini quotes:

Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.

If Beethoven is a prodigy of man, Bach is a miracle of God.

Beethoven I take twice a week, Haydn four times, and Mozart every day.

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind.

Eating, loving, singing, and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool.

The language of music is common to all generations and nations; it is understood by everybody, since it is understood with the heart.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Answer them critics with silence and indifference. It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument. . . .

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

Music is a kind of harmonious language.

Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair.

Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity.