Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart – this is nonsense.

The experience awakened ’my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music – that is the death of a musician.

But one day, when I was still young, I was parted from my family and left my native country. I hunted and searched for music, and destiny turned me into the object of my hunt. The circumstances of life became my ‘antlers’ and prevented me from returning home.

During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty’s vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity.

Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.

Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

I have a theory that there is something abnormal about children who like to practice instruments They are either geniuses or, more often, completely untalented. I certainly did not like to practice, and the teacher who hit me, and the view of the park, did not help to improve my attitude.

The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.

Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.