- Gian Carlo Menotti: One thing I did know is that I wanted to use as many young artists as possible. Not only young artists but I liked the idea of having a combination of well known masters flanked by people who are just making their debut.
- Gian Carlo Menotti: Theatrical music has to be immediate. You can not wait for the curtain to come down and then say oh well that's what he wanted to say. You have to reach the heart of the listener immediately.
- Clive Barnes: Menotti is more than a composer. In Italy his talents have been to hold this festival balanced on the high wire between shiny success and dim disaster. His total energies have been devoted to keeping his festival going. In Spoleto he is a father figure, a padrone. He strides through the town as if he owned it. And in a very real sense he does. And his festival, that fragile enterprise, has always been kept clean of the disruptive influence of Italian politics, simply by this man's stature.
- Nino Rota: One of the main reasons this festival goes on with good success is that there is no political influence. And so the programs we see and we hear are not suggested by political reasons but only by artistical reasons.
- Charles Wadsworth: The amazing thing to me is that the whole feeling that we've developed in Spoleto somehow the whole thing has transferred. Here after the first day or so the audience came with enthusiasm to the concerts and went away with such enthusiasm that now chamber music seems to have found an extraordinarily important place in the festival.