Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.

Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.

From Toscanini I learnt the essential and desperate seriousness of making music.

Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.