Beethoven Quotes

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.

If Beethoven and Bach hooked up with Mozart and made a band, they could be a distant runner up to The D.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme.

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

I'm a Beethoven freak. I listen to him all the time.

I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.

Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

One of my dogs is in the movie Beethoven's 2nd.

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.

Yesterday I was playing Beethoven's fifth, because I love that.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.