Always the journey, never the destination.
What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset.
You don't like Liverpool: you either loathe it or you love it. And I don't know anyone who loathes it and comes from it.
The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest.
We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music.
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.
Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable.
My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people.
I think we will find more and more ways in which technology invades our artistic spaces, so music is something you will need more than ever because it is there in time and in space and for that moment only.
'Parsifal' is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.
'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.
I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.
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.
I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.
It's interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.
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.
You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football.
Orchestras are like people. They're the sonic embodiment of their community.
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.
One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.
