To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.
I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.
Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us.
False notes can be forgiven, false music cannot.
The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.
Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.
Music was not invented by the composer, but found.
Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.
[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.
As far as the execution is concerned ... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it.
You should never listen to someone practice. That is their work and theirs alone.
In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves - which makes us more indulgent and more understanding - and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.
The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways. ... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.
[On the music of Richard Strauss:] Too many notes!
