Top 60 Quotes & Sayings by Simon Rattle
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English musician Simon Rattle.
Last updated on November 7, 2024.
Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.
Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing.
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.
As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again?
As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles' question, 'Will you still need me when I'm 64?'
I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been.
The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation.
I've always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano.
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.
My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people.
I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.
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.
I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it.
Yes, I was a weird duck, no doubt.
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.
We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music.
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.
Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.
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.
Always the journey, never the destination.
I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.
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.
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.
Orchestras are like people. They're the sonic embodiment of their community.
You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football.
There are a few great orchestras in the world, thank goodness. Although some people do put them in ranking order, it's not like a snooker match. Each orchestra has different things to offer.
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.
'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.
Every orchestra has its own sound.
One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.
'Parsifal' is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.
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.
I think Beethoven means dissonances to be more stressed than consonances - it's the shock tactician in him.
It's interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.
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.
I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor.
What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset.
Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable.
There is a mysterious way in which orchestras keep a sense of their history and what they've done. I still listen to the L.A. Philharmonic and feel that Giulini was there.
'Career' is not a musical term.
The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around.
Conductors make too much fuss about conductors! Humility and hard work are virtues. We're nothing without our musicians.
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.
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.
Oh Lord... I don't really do pride.
Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything.
The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it.
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.
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.'
I believe if you're not completely in love with what you're doing, you'd better find another profession.
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.
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.
Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires.
If you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you're in big trouble.
I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach.
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.
Culture and, within culture, music are the best and most fascinating thing that the German capital has to offer internationally. It is putting that at risk.
I can’t imagine what my school friends must have thought was going on because I was wandering around in some kind of dream. I felt as though my insides had been taken out which is, I now realize, the right feeling.
If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
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