The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.

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.

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.

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

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

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.