The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it..

It is desirable that people make music on the breath, with the breath..

When you go out onto the stage, all the preparation has to be forced into your subconscious. For the moment of the performance, we all have to return….

Unfortunately, it happens all too seldom that you really disappear behind a work, that you are no longer audible as an interpreter..

Toward the end of his life, one can sense that he was no longer thinking his way into the minds of others, causing them to speak on his behalf, but t….

With creative people, truly new horizons open up..

All music has to speak in some form or other..

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out..

But the thing that will always occupy me the most is music..

Anyone who draws attention to himself as an individual, is viewed with suspicion. We acquired this tendency, of course, from America, and we must res….

The work is the most important thing..

And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next….

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts..

The reason why Schubert is celebrated so much today, lies rather in the fact that there has been nobody else like him - not before him, not after him..

I came together with younger musicians and tried to pass on my own experiences. In the process, I always tried to maintain my curiosity and spontanei….

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the po….

...in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn ….

Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plough. The trick is just to wake them up, to sharpen their ears for what's….

In Romanticism, the main determinant is the mood, the atmosphere. And in that regard, you could also describe Schubert as a Romantic..

Admittedly, it is really our duty, as artists, to hold up a mirror to our own era; but, on the other hand, these works have lives of their own, and t….

If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the ….