Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.
Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.
Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.
In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.
Live life to the full, and become more curious every day. The more you find out about life, the richer your music-making will be.
Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.
I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.
Music is not a profession. Music is a way of life - one that requires much professionalism.
No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.
I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.
You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.
In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.
It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.
When we talk about music, we talk about our reaction to it. One person might say that music is so poetic, while another says it's all mathematics. Yet another might say it's about sensuality, and so on. That's all true. But music is not just one of these things. It's everything all at once.
There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.
I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.
There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.
What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day.
I don't like possessions.
