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

After about six months, I told my mother that I wanted the lessons to stop, and she was intelligent enough not to force me to continue. Besides, the lessons cost money, which was anything but abundant in our household.

During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty's vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity.

The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.

I have a theory that there is something abnormal about children who like to practice instruments They are either geniuses or, more often, completely untalented. I certainly did not like to practice, and the teacher who hit me, and the view of the park, did not help to improve my attitude.

Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.