“You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about …” — Daniel Barenboim

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.

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

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

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.