Conductor Quotes - Page 2

• The conductor's stand is not a continent of power, but rather an island of solitude.

  Riccardo Muti

  Islands, Solitude, Continents

  17 Copy quote

• The conductor has the advantage of not seeing the audience.

  Andre Kostelanetz

  Advantage, Audience, Seeing

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• There's power in the collective. If you don't believe me, just watch a symphony orchestra with a conductor and 120 people who are thinking about exactly the same thing at the same moment - no babies, no stock markets, no mortgages. Just 32nd notes.

  Quincy Jones

  Baby, Believe, Thinking

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• If you want to please the critics, don't play too loud, too soft, too fast, too slow.

  Arturo Toscanini

  Music, Play, Want

  62 Copy quote

• The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo.

  Richard Wagner

  Duty, Ability, Tempo

  Richard Wagner (1887). “Wagner on Conducting”, p.20, Courier Corporation

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• Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

  John Philip Sousa

  Heart, Ideas, Soul

  15 Copy quote

• You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Light, May, Hounds

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• Young conductors who are confident enough, they very often have success.

  Kurt Masur

  Enough, Young

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• On the other hand, when I give it closer thought, I realize I'm not enough of a dictator to conduct an orchestra because it requires a pretty awful person. When you read these biographies of famous conductors, they are all awful people who fail in their private relationships.

  Eberhard Weber

  Hands, People, Giving

  8 Copy quote

• You know why conductors live so long? Because we perspire so much.

  John Barbirolli

  Long, Knows

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• I always imagined that to bring an orchestra to play together is not enough for a conductor.

  Kurt Masur

  Play, Together, Orchestra

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• Conducting, I tried it once off the cuff, and quickly realized there were subtle aspects that I was missing. There is a lot more to it that I was able to grasp simply by watching conductors.

  Carter Burwell

  Missing, Cuffs, Able

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• The success of our operas rests most of the time in the hands of the conductor. This person is as necessary as a tenor or a prima donna.

  Giuseppe Verdi

  Hands, Opera, Tenors

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• Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Romantic, Careers, Classic

  In Robert Craft 'Conversations with Igor Stravinsky' (1958)

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• As a conductor I find the hardest tasks are to listen to the instinct of a musician and to hear the music behind the notes.

  Edward Gardner

  Listening, Musician, Tasks

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• A great conductor possesses that certain charisma and talent that demand the ears and the attention of an audience. I can't tell you how that happens, but I'm sure it has an inner basis that is never learned.

  Isaac Stern

  Attention, Ears, Demand

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• The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

  Ray Stannard Baker

  Men, Atlanta, White Man

  Ray Stannard Baker (1908). “Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy”

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• If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

  Gustav Mahler

  Funny, Music, Expression

  Letter to Max Marschalk, March 26, 1896.

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• I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.

  Harriet Tubman

  Track, Railroads, Lost

  Quoted in Lyde Cullen Sizer, Divided Houses (1992)

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• You know as I started as a shy young conductor, I always wanted to cooperate. To build up the musicians. To help them to be better than without a conductor. And sometimes young talented musicians have to be encouraged.

  Kurt Masur

  Musician, Shy, Helping

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• The awful thing about a conductor becoming geriatric is that you seem to become more desirable, not less.

  Neville Marriner

  Awful, Becoming, Seems

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• Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual.

  Maureen Forrester

  Spiritual, Gone, Mahler

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• Only when every one of us and every nation learns the secret of love for all mankind will the world become a great orchestra, following the beat of the Greatest Conductor of all.

  Artur Rodzinski

  Secret Love, World, Orchestra

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• I don't feel that the conductor has real power. The orchestra has the power, and every member of it knows instantaneously if you're just beating time.

  Itzhak Perlman

  Real, Orchestra, Members

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• The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

  Anton Seidl

  Responsibility, Spirit, Composer

  Anton Seidl (2014). “On Conducting”, p.100, Parrot Press

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