The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence.

I was told when I went for a life-insurance exam when I was 18 that I was not likely to live past 50, so I refused to pay the premium.

In Hamburg, there are three major orchestras, an opera house, and one of the great concert-hall acoustics in Europe at the Laeiszhalle, in a town a fifth the size of London. And that's not unusual. In Germany, there are dozens of towns with two or three orchestras. The connection with music goes very, very deep.

I can't even touch another conductor's baton. The center of gravity, the feel of the handle, puts me totally off.

Concert-going has become much less the thing to do, while people are still going to opera. This might be a harsh judgment, but it could easily happen that orchestras could slowly atrophy.