 To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius. |
| I don't dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen. |
| To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together. |
| Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been. |
| The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious. What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky. |
| When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store. |
| It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music. |
| Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it. |
| I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own. |
| In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts. |
| Great music does not just make me feel good. It means something. It makes us understand. It makes us happy. |
