I can’t live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it, or thinking about it .
The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.
Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm.
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn’t matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.
Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart’s – the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering – a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.
This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.
If you’re a good composer, you steal good steals.
I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff.
Life without music is unthinkable.
The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.
I’m not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.