Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor. "

Related Quotes:

" We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music. "

" Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures. "

" As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again? "

" Oh Lord... I don't really do pride. "

" We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music. "

" Conducting 'Tristan' is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange. "

" 'Pelleas et Melisande' is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively. "

" With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven't started three years before, I'm screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together. "

" Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious. "

" Always the journey, never the destination. "

" My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people. "

" One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief. "

Difficult Things

" I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been. "

" American economists can't understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis. They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course - 'Why can't they agree with us?' I would have thought it was fairly obvious. "

" My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is, of course, why I'm not a great conductor. "

" The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall. "

" The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation. "

" I am old enough to remember the enormous fight over Tate Modern. It is such a part of our cultural landscape now, we forget the opposition to it. "

" I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy. "

" One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I'll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language. "

" I think Beethoven means dissonances to be more stressed than consonances - it's the shock tactician in him. "

" In England, unless I am mistaken, I think some of the politicians who love classical music and opera are a bit loath to be seen there in case people think it is elitist. That is a real shame because it also means we are not allowing our politicians a hinterland that an earlier generation, a Denis Healey, would have taken for granted. "

" Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds. "

" I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach. "

" Orchestras are like people. They're the sonic embodiment of their community. "

" Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires. "

" I've always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano. "

" Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything. "

" There is a mysterious way in which orchestras keep a sense of their history and what they've done. I still listen to the L.A. Philharmonic and feel that Giulini was there. "

" In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music. "