To play four hands requires two people who have great affinity for each other.

When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.

I have accumulated so many experiences, so much, that I want to be able to realize so many things. This is why I have basically given up most of my positions.

I am the conductor for life of the Staatskapelle in Berlin, which fills me with tremendous joy because I feel absolutely at one with them. When we play, I have a feeling that together we manage to create one collective lung for the whole orchestra so that everybody in the stage breathes the music in the same way.

Most of the time I spend looking for the 25th hour in the day, the ninth day in the week, the 32nd day in the month and the 367th, eighth or 70th day in the year because I feel I have a very rich life.

I am permanently relaxed.

I don't believe in changing the unchangeable.

I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.

Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.

I don't think I'm anti-Israeli.

I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it's in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side.

Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders.

I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.

You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.

I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.

More and more, we're used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.

Every concert I've finished with the knowledge I've played a fistful of wrong notes.

Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.

Playing and listening to music gives you a sense of fulfilment because you have to put everything in you at its disposal.

'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.

Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.

I get no satisfaction just showing myself in every corner of the world every week.

Any conductor who tells you that if he is approached for the directorship of the Chicago Symphony that he's not interested in it, you know perfectly well he's lying.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

You have to really have the will to hang onto the first note as it is being played, and then really stay with it and take the flight, as it were, you know, for the duration of the piece.

I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

In order to lift a certain object from the ground, we have to use energy. But then to sustain it at that level, we have to keep on adding energy, or otherwise, the object falls to the ground. It's exactly the same thing with the sound.

Every note is a lifetime for itself.

We need a certain amount of energy to produce the sound. But then to sustain it, we have to give more energy, or otherwise, it goes and it dies in silence. And therefore, sound is absolutely, inextricably connected to time, the length of time.

I feel that the Jews have always had a special connection to this part of the world, which in geographical terms was called Palestine for so many centuries.

I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.

There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.

I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.

Children in schools need to have something to do with music and learn it the way they do literature, geography and biology.

When we talk about music, we talk about our reaction to it. One person might say that music is so poetic, while another says it's all mathematics. Yet another might say it's about sensuality, and so on. That's all true. But music is not just one of these things. It's everything all at once.

People need to have enough to eat and have work and money. But there are other things that are important.

The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.

On Nov. 5, 2012, my friend Elliott Carter died in New York at the age of 103. For me, he was and remains one of the most interesting figures of music history in the past century.

For me personally, Elliott Carter was and remains one of the most meaningful composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries because he represents substance. He was the living proof of uncompromising, complex music, which at first seems inaccessible. But it becomes accessible if one digs in and sees the development through.

I am convinced that 100 years from now, people will talk about Elliott Carter as one of the most important figures in the second half of 20th-century music.

There are many wonderful orchestras in the world, but very few who have a character or personality of their own. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of them, and I think it very important to recognize and respect that character.

There is too much employer-employee relationship in America. I wish the musicians would feel that many decisions have to do with them and not delegate everything to management or to the board or to the committee. This is why you get a sense of pride in some of the European orchestras: because they are part of the decision-making.