Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.
Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully
Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.
Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.
I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.
First of all I listen to music. I like music.
I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.
I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.
I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.
It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work.
I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture.
But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man
I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect.
When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee
I don't use old music.
Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland
But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.
I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.
In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.
