20th-century Conductor Quotes

Leonard Bernstein

Yehudi Menuhin

Henry Mancini

John Williams

Daniel Barenboim

Lorin Maazel

Dimitri Tiomkin

To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.

Daniel Barenboim

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

Leonard Bernstein

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate.

Harry Connick, Jr.

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.

If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion, and not a reality.

I gave you my arms, my lips, my heart,
My love, my life, my all,
But the best that I had to offer you
I found was all too small.

First of all, when you enter a conservatory, it's already too late. The kind of connection that has to be made with an instrument, be it a piano, strings, a wind instrument, it really has to start much younger – five, six, seven - eight years-old is already getting late. The instrument must really become an extension of yourself. That neuromuscular connection between intention and realization is something that really has to be started very young. And the years between nine or ten and twenty, that's when one should learn the whole repertoire.

A New York City taxi driver asked him where to go; Karajan replied "No matter - I am in demand everywhere."

Herbert von Karajan

Nothing is so common as to see a political upheaval pass practically unnoticed merely because the names of the leaders and their parties remain the same.

Constant Lambert

Conducting is the sound of a musician who makes no sound.

In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahmss four symphonies and Richard Strausss tone poems.

In all teaching there must be a fusion of authority as an adult providing a stable framework for the children in one's care, and humility as another human being ready to educate an equal who may turn out to be a superior.

In the Bronx, we had three synagogues on one block at 161st Street. My father was Orthodox and we went to the Sephardi one. Further along was the Conservative, the biggest. In between was the Ashkenazi shul. And guess who was their shabbos goy? Colin Powell!

But one day, when I was still young, I was parted from my family and left my native country. I hunted and searched for music, and destiny turned me into the object of my hunt. The circumstances of life became my 'antlers' and prevented me from returning home.

You put your right arm in,
Your right arm out
In, out, in, out and shake it all about.
You do the hokey cokey and you turn around,
And that's what it's all about.

The nice thing about an -ism, someone once observed, is how quickly it becomes a wasm. Some musical wasms—academic-wasm, for example, and its dependent varieties of modern-wasm and Serial-wasm—continue to linger on artifical life support, thought, and continue to threaten the increasingly fragile classical ecosystem.

Richard Taruskin

Leroy Anderson is an American original - direct, honest, personal, idiosyncratic, and free of pretension. His music is directed to, and reflective of, the American soul.

Leroy Anderson was a crossover composer before anyone came up with the term. The voice of Leroy Anderson became the voice of the Boston Pops in its dual commitment to approachability and to excellence.

I come to a performance of music that I know very well as if I were performing it for the first time. Every day is a new day, a new experience. This is the way I approach a masterpiece. A masterpiece can never age - it's only the people who perform it or listen to it who become insensitive to it. If you come with a fresh feeling toward a masterpiece, it will always feel fresh and give you the benefit of its genius.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

Benjamin Britten

I wanted to combine American purity and beauty of sound and the virtuosity of execution with the European sense of tradition, warmth of expression, and sense of style.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Oscar acceptance speech for best score in 1955:

I would like to thank Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Dimitri Tiomkin

Parsifal is the kind of opera that starts at six o'clock. After it has been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6.20.