Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.

It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.

For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.