I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.
I don't think I'm anti-Israeli.
I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it's in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side.
Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders.
I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.
You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.
I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.
More and more, we're used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.
Every concert I've finished with the knowledge I've played a fistful of wrong notes.
Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.
Playing and listening to music gives you a sense of fulfilment because you have to put everything in you at its disposal.
'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.
Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.
I get no satisfaction just showing myself in every corner of the world every week.
Any conductor who tells you that if he is approached for the directorship of the Chicago Symphony that he's not interested in it, you know perfectly well he's lying.
The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.
Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.
Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.
You have to really have the will to hang onto the first note as it is being played, and then really stay with it and take the flight, as it were, you know, for the duration of the piece.
I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.
