The academy gave me a grounding in discipline and hard work that has sustained me throughout my life, and the lessons I learned there I now try to impress on young people.

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

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

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.

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

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

I can only hope that neither of them was scarred by their upbringing.