The Compulsion to Conduct
“To respect the audience, you must respect the music. The simple love of music must be the driving force. The ego is a barrier between the score and the audience.”
“…the exhilaration of performing before a public in a concert hall where nobody can stop to correct anything and you can’t go and listen to what you’ve just done and come back and try to do better: it’s now or never….”
“The compulsion to conduct (today) is about 100th of what it was. You could say, at a time when you’re not sure whether you want to do it or not, that’s the time you can do it well, because you’re not getting in the way any more. If you want to do something too badly, you generally mess it up. But the basis is that I still like music and I still like human beings.”
“The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same. Everyone wants immediate success, immediate celebrity, and that doesn’t produce what used to be artists. The private inner life must always to be the guiding force. I think of someone like Mozart, who never deviated from what he was. That is the only way forward.”