Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Alfred Brendel

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

You need three or five hands to play Ligeti.

You have to be aware of all the latent possibilities that give a work its special character - its atmosphere, its moods, its contrasts.

Art gives a sense of order, life is basically chaotic, and there's a tension between them. A sense of order comes from chaos and contains a bit of it, but it's the sense of order that is important in a work of art.

I'm coming back to what you said about seeing and listening and hearing. I had to think of a remark that I heard yesterday, somebody came and said ' I saw you concert' Can we change the usage of, of this phrase please? And I hope that some of the people in our concert tonight will listen and even hear what we are doing!

I have a great need to learn what the norm is by dealing with what is not the norm... with the grotesque and the fantastic.

In his larger forms, Schubert is a wanderer. He likes to move at the edge of the precipice, and does so with the assurance of a sleepwalker. To wander is the Romantic condition; one yields to it enraptured, or is driven and plagued by the terror of finding no escape. More often than not, happiness is but the surface of despair.

Silence ought also to be the core of each concert. Remember the anagram: listen = silent.

The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent.'

Silence... is the essence of the music itself, the vital ingredient that makes it possible for the music to exist at all.

If I belong to a tradition it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what he should do and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

I want to make music. That means I prefer the Steinway piano.

A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.