Conductor Quotes

Richard Wagner

Igor Stravinsky

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Leonard Bernstein

Antonio Salieri

Yehudi Menuhin

Henry Mancini

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

The ability to conduct is a gift of God with which few have been endowed in full measure.

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

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.

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.

Igor Stravinsky

The highest reaches of music come thrillingly close to the central core and essence of life itself.

Leopold Stokowski

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

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

Oscar acceptance speech for best score in 1955:

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

Dimitri Tiomkin

With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.

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!

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

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

Daniel Barenboim

I regret they don't have symphony orchestras all over the world so I could see Burma and Samarkand.

In your life expect some trouble
When you worry you make it double.

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.

Too many students who are technically quite far advanced do not properly interpret the technically less difficult pieces they play, because they regard them as beneath serious consideration. This is a fundamental error in musical taste and judgment.

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

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.

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

Harry Connick, Jr.

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.

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'm so sorry for you; your lives have been so easy. You can't play great music unless your heart's been broken.

Benjamin Zander

You can't just take kids off the streets, put them in a hall, and expect them to know how to react.... During my first season, while I was conducting a youth concert, one kid went through a plate glass window and two bathrooms were totally destroyed...