Simon Rattle
One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I'll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language.Collection: Communication
Always the journey, never the destination.
Conductors make too much fuss about conductors! Humility and hard work are virtues. We're nothing without our musicians.
What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset.
One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.
'Pelleas et Melisande' is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively.
We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music.
I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it.
Orchestras are like people. They're the sonic embodiment of their community.
As a nation, we English tend to be self-deprecating, looking down on ourselves. We're insular but also flexible, whereas in Germany, it's a case of besser wissen - we know better. That's very Deutsch. People are never frightened to tell you what you're doing wrong, in a way that would never happen in England.
You don't like Liverpool: you either loathe it or you love it. And I don't know anyone who loathes it and comes from it.
My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is, of course, why I'm not a great conductor.
If you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you're in big trouble.
As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again?
Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.
Oh Lord... I don't really do pride.
I am old enough to remember the enormous fight over Tate Modern. It is such a part of our cultural landscape now, we forget the opposition to it.
In England, unless I am mistaken, I think some of the politicians who love classical music and opera are a bit loath to be seen there in case people think it is elitist. That is a real shame because it also means we are not allowing our politicians a hinterland that an earlier generation, a Denis Healey, would have taken for granted.
I was thrilled that Sadiq Khan was so in support of the idea of culture being at the centre of a city and the idea that it is everyone's right. It can't be a matter of privilege or chance. It should be something everyone can have in their life, and that means knowing what it is.
I think we will find more and more ways in which technology invades our artistic spaces, so music is something you will need more than ever because it is there in time and in space and for that moment only.
I've always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano.
Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.
American economists can't understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis. They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course - 'Why can't they agree with us?' I would have thought it was fairly obvious.
The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest.
Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires.
I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been.
Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing.
I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach.
If you receive a whole string of bad reviews, you have to say, 'O.K., maybe there's something here we should pay attention to.'
Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable.
Yes, I was a weird duck, no doubt.
In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music.
Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.
The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.
As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles' question, 'Will you still need me when I'm 64?'
'Career' is not a musical term.
'Parsifal' is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.
Conducting 'Tristan' is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange.
Nobody has Francis Bacon on their walls in their house - or very few people - but sometimes people listen to Beethoven as though it was background and a comfort, and I think that is very dangerous.
With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven't started three years before, I'm screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together.
Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything.
I think Beethoven means dissonances to be more stressed than consonances - it's the shock tactician in him.
You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football.
We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music.
The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around.
I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.
Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures.
It's interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.
I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.
The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it.