People need to have enough to eat and have work and money. But there are other things that are important.

When we talk about music, we talk about our reaction to it. One person might say that music is so poetic, while another says it's all mathematics. Yet another might say it's about sensuality, and so on. That's all true. But music is not just one of these things. It's everything all at once.

Children in schools need to have something to do with music and learn it the way they do literature, geography and biology.

I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.

There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.

I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.

I feel that the Jews have always had a special connection to this part of the world, which in geographical terms was called Palestine for so many centuries.

We need a certain amount of energy to produce the sound. But then to sustain it, we have to give more energy, or otherwise, it goes and it dies in silence. And therefore, sound is absolutely, inextricably connected to time, the length of time.

Every note is a lifetime for itself.

In order to lift a certain object from the ground, we have to use energy. But then to sustain it at that level, we have to keep on adding energy, or otherwise, the object falls to the ground. It's exactly the same thing with the sound.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.

You have to really have the will to hang onto the first note as it is being played, and then really stay with it and take the flight, as it were, you know, for the duration of the piece.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

Any conductor who tells you that if he is approached for the directorship of the Chicago Symphony that he's not interested in it, you know perfectly well he's lying.

I get no satisfaction just showing myself in every corner of the world every week.

Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.

'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.

Playing and listening to music gives you a sense of fulfilment because you have to put everything in you at its disposal.

Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.

Every concert I've finished with the knowledge I've played a fistful of wrong notes.

More and more, we're used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.