With the Beethoven sonata project, the emphasis was principally on the music, although Schnabel was considered its greatest exponent.

You played very well but I would like you to take the Fourth Sonata of Beethoven and figure it out for yourself.

Except for recordings made by famous tenors, the emphasis in classical recording has for the most part recently been on the work, and even more on the composer-the performer being spotlighted as the composer's most accomplished representative.

To comprehend the distaste for modernism, it must be admitted at the start that the greatest works of modernism in all the arts are, much of the time, fundamentally disagreeable when first encountered.

A cough is the basic sign of inattention. Musicians never, in my experience, cough when playing in public.

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.