Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plough. The trick is just to wake them up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

Unfortunately, it happens all too seldom that you really disappear behind a work, that you are no longer audible as an interpreter.

One has to get through a big pile of mail every day. I don't pass my letters on to a secretary; rather, I try to take care of all of them myself.

Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plough. The trick is just to wake them up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.