"The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm"."
Leonard Constant Lambert was a British composer, conductor, and author. He was the founding music director of the Royal Ballet, and he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement.
"Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake."
Constant Lambert"The Appalling Popularity of Music."
Constant Lambert"There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached by Ravel towards the end of La Valse and towards the beginning of Bolero)."
Constant Lambert"Lambert, who admired Duke Ellington and proclaimed his harmonic roots in Frederick Delius (who in his turn had taken them from Debussy), was a fearless reconciler of what the academies and Tin Pan Alley alike presumed to be eternally opposed…In 1972, on a plane from New York to Toronto, I found myself sitting next to Duke Ellington, who spoke almost with tears in his eyes of the stature of Lambert."
Constant Lambert"The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be."
Constant Lambert"Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same."
Constant Lambert