> Antonio Salieri: [reflecting upon Mozart's scores] Astounding! It was actually, it was beyond belief. These were first and only drafts of music, but they showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. He had simply written down music already finished in his head! Page after page of it as if he were just taking dictation.
And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall. It was clear to me that sound I had heard in the Archbishop's palace had been no accident. Here again was the very Voice of …

> The Jupiter Symphony's finale strikes the listener as an extremely academic, meticulously worked out movement, in which the learned sections truly achieve an elevated level of expression. In contrast, the "learned" sections of the quintet's finale, and especially the final climax, strike the listener as jocular in character.
It seems more the result of his own capricious musical personality than of a desire to create something elevated in style. In fact, he is almost parading his ability to do effortlessly what other composers find enormously difficult.

> Nino Rota scored over 150 movies in 46 years, sometimes more than ten in a single year. That's in addition to writing dozens of chamber, choral, and orchestral works, including a string concerto, and scoring numerous theatrical productions, including five ballets and ten operas. All the while working as a music professor. To call the man tireless would be an understatement. He conducted his first oratorio at the age of eleven and then basically never stopped until his death in 1979.
Rota was friends with Stravinski, occasionally dove into twelve-tone music, and in general simply loved thi…