Stephen Hough Quotes

“The daily glitter of skyscrapers competing with the stars is an unnecessary, unforgivable decadence.”

― Stephen Hough

“Food waste is an atrocity that is reducible, if not completely avoidable.”

― Stephen Hough

“Out of silence is born concentration, and from that comes learning.”

― Stephen Hough

“In anything, there has to be that moment of fasting, really, in order to enjoy the feast.”

― Stephen Hough

“Silence is the necessary soil for any thought to flourish.”

― Stephen Hough

“I wanted to be a monk at some time in my life, or a priest, so there was a kind of reflex quite early on not to be attached to anything that might be taken away.”

― Stephen Hough

“At moments of acute joy or sorrow, men and women throughout history have sung or reached for musical instruments to express the inexpressible. When minds are taut with emotional entanglement, there seems to be an inner compulsive instinct to release and harness this tension through the measured vibrations in the air that we call music.”

― Stephen Hough

“Life is an incurable disease leading to death, but it’s also an unrequested gift, which, if we can manage to keep giving it away to others, can keep giving back everything to us.”

― Stephen Hough

“Few occupations pass the solitary hours more fruitfully than the playing of a musical instrument.”

― Stephen Hough

“Traveling the road can be quite tiresome.”

― Stephen Hough

“If you arrive at a concert ready to play your piece, that’s not nearly good enough. You must have your music ready to the point where you can play it on a short rehearsal, after a long plane flight, on a strange piano, having had an unpleasant lunch, in an unfriendly atmosphere. You have to be so over-prepared that you can cope with anything.”

― Stephen Hough

“One of the things that touches me most when I play for an audience is that although we may be unable to communicate in words or have diametrically opposed views on hot-button issues, while the music sounds we can be at peace, we can be friends. The vibrations that fill an auditorium have no passports, and they unite ears when hearts may be divided.”

― Stephen Hough

“Unlike a high-wire walker, I don’t think any musician strikes the wires of a piano or draws a bow across a violin’s strings primarily for the kick of an adrenalin fix. There is danger on stage, but dropped notes are not broken bones; a memory lapse is not a tumble to the ground.”

― Stephen Hough

“Live in the present moment. The past and future are nonexistent. Only the present can be grasped or, better, embraced.”

― Stephen Hough

“I was very quick; I did nothing but play the piano apart from being at school. I was at home with my mother, saying, ‘Go out and get some fresh air.’ No, I wanted to play the piano all the time I could. I was completely obsessed.”

― Stephen Hough

“I love food, but if I find a restaurant I like in a new city, I can eat every meal there, and sometimes I do… and even sometimes the same dish.”

― Stephen Hough

“To me, spirituality is the everyday stuff which we’re dealing with all the time. It’s not going into some ecstatic trance. It’s changing a nappy, or making a meal at the end of a very tiring day.”

― Stephen Hough

“Many people who don’t like Rachmaninov’s style consider the ‘Rhapsody’ his masterpiece. It’s written fantastically well for orchestra and piano. He combines a lot of effervescence with a deep, Romantic spirit.”

― Stephen Hough

“I’d never thought about living in London until about 1999.”

― Stephen Hough

“I have had a place in New York in the musicians’ district on the Upper West Side since 1986.”

― Stephen Hough

“If you are not living in the same area when you are looking for property, it is a nightmare because you come down for a day or two, have appointments to see places, and have to be able to make instant decisions before flying off to St. Louis or somewhere.”

― Stephen Hough

“I’ve always written – about music, art, things going on around the world. The danger is that it becomes too personal. I don’t think people want it at that level of intimacy.”

― Stephen Hough

“My principal commitment is playing the piano. But I always loved words.”

― Stephen Hough

“Painting is just a hobby. I really don’t think of it much more than that. But writing music and writing words… my life would feel as if it had a big hole if I took those away.”

― Stephen Hough

“I don’t think of faith as something that’s like a rock, that never changes. I think it’s something that’s very fluid, always changing.”

― Stephen Hough

“I wanted to be a disc jockey.”

― Stephen Hough

“I like the extras in life. Concentrating on serious things doesn’t mean you can’t also enjoy the lighter ones.”

― Stephen Hough

“There are many doors to the heart.”

― Stephen Hough

“I love my painting – it fills me with passion. But it’s not something I expect anyone else to love.”

― Stephen Hough

“I can admire music where you feel the composer has everything organized and perfectly shaped, but it doesn’t touch me. I like to feel that a composer is wounded, like all of us.”

― Stephen Hough

“There’s certainly no doubt that commercialism has entered classical music to such a degree that almost no one seems to care anymore about the physical and mental health of the performer.”

― Stephen Hough

“It’s so easy for all the success in the world to suddenly end, and I’m quite aware of that.”

― Stephen Hough

“Once or twice, I’ve taken the Gideon Bible out of the drawer, opened it at random, and found myself stuck in the middle of a genealogical list. And that’s when I thought: why not cherry-pick the best bits, passages that people can actually use?”

― Stephen Hough

“I’ve twice been on the point of giving up my performing career to train for the priesthood.”

― Stephen Hough

“To me, the heart of the ministry lies in being able to help deeply distressed people, not because of your own qualities but because you represent Christ.”

― Stephen Hough

“I once nodded off during one of my own concerts. While I was playing.”

― Stephen Hough

“All things of beauty can speak to us of God, and I’m very happy to listen to and be inspired by people of every religious background.”

― Stephen Hough

“I didn’t want to look back in 10 or 20 years and say, ‘Yes, I always wanted to write that piano sonata or that novel, but I never had time.’”

― Stephen Hough

“Schubert, Franck, and Liszt were all Roman Catholics who questioned or doubted or lived in different ways, and religion was certainly part of all their lives.”

― Stephen Hough

“It’s very hard to come up with ideal situations… With different moods and the difficulties of traveling around, I often play my best under the worst conditions.”

― Stephen Hough

“Debussy is one of the few composers who actually created a new sound on the piano – or perhaps we should say a new smell, so perfumed are the vibrations which emanate from the instrument.”

― Stephen Hough

“No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.”

― Stephen Hough

“They both changed the way we hear the sound of the piano, both of them inventors of sonority: Chopin took bel canto singing lines and reproduced them on the keyboard above richly upholstered counterpoint; Debussy somehow preserved vibrations in the air, blending their ephemeral magic into music that reaches far back into deep memory.”

― Stephen Hough

“My place in London is very small, so a piano would take up a third of the room. I leave home in the morning when I’m there and go to my studio. I close the door, and it’s soundproof. There’s no phone or TV or computer, and I can work uninterruptedly. That has been a huge advantage over the years.”

― Stephen Hough

“Why do people compose music? Why do people listen to music? When we go into a concert, we go into a place where we want to experience a sort of ecstasy, to come out of ourselves.”

― Stephen Hough

“The ‘Missa Mirabilis’ is a big work which was conceived for a large organ and a lot of singers.”

― Stephen Hough

“Musicians keep playing when the lights go out, when people are suffering, confused, or angry.”

― Stephen Hough

“In every generation, politicians let us down, but music can lift us above the fighting and the mistakes. It does not offer answers to specific political questions. Instead, it looks beyond them.”

― Stephen Hough

“Classical music thinks in centuries, not four-year terms.”

― Stephen Hough

“In superficial terms, to have an orchestral career is to be better than others, or at least to be chosen over others on that particular occasion; it is a form of survival.”

― Stephen Hough

“If ‘ecstasy’ means to stand outside ourselves, then what better ambition can there be as we wait in the wings of the Royal Albert Hall: to leave self-obsession behind and take the audience on a journey across the high wire of Beethoven or the flying trapeze of Liszt.”

― Stephen Hough

“Most people are at a concert because they want to be inspired, entertained, moved; we musicians have the mission to be bringers of joy, of ecstasy.”

― Stephen Hough

“Playing the piano is incredibly personal… But when it’s your own piece, it’s doubly so.”

― Stephen Hough

“In Britten or Berg, there’s a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about – that tension. It’s why we want to say anything at all.”

― Stephen Hough

“Freedom comes with the impossibility of choosing.”

― Stephen Hough

“If they say they don’t like the way I play Beethoven, then I can swallow that, and maybe they’re right. But if they don’t like what I’ve written, then it’s about me.”

― Stephen Hough

“I love teaching.”

― Stephen Hough

“Bach and Beethoven erected temples and churches on the heights. I only wanted to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.”

― Stephen Hough

“Learning great works like the Liszt Sonata or Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ should be a struggle to a certain extent, where you need to labor intensely with your own brain and soul for the meaning of the work instead of cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff together from the Internet and – boom! – there you are with a performance ready to go.”

― Stephen Hough

“The Internet tempts us to think that because an email or a new website can be accessed in seconds that everything works at the same instant speed. Art is more like the growth of a plant. It needs time and space.”

― Stephen Hough

“I remember, in school during English lessons, I would ask the teacher what were the most difficult books to read, and when she’d say ‘Ulysses’ or something, I’d run off to the library to check out a copy, eager to attempt the most difficult mountain.”

― Stephen Hough

“I don’t watch television! At least not when I’m traveling. For some reason, I have always found it depressing to watch television in hotel rooms. I try to use that time, as well as time on planes, to write.”

― Stephen Hough

“The things I do outside of playing the piano are done out of an inner necessity, not just because I want to try my hand at different things.”

― Stephen Hough

“I would do a sort of violence to myself if I didn’t express myself in the directly creative ways of writing, both words and music.”

― Stephen Hough

“In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I’ve always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.”

― Stephen Hough

“There must be so many people who have various artistic talents that, for whatever reason, just have no way of expressing them. Either they have no support from their family or they live in a part of the world, maybe they’ve never heard a piano or seen a piano.”

― Stephen Hough

“I think there are very few people that I would give the title of genius to, really, but Beethoven unquestionably is one of them.”

― Stephen Hough

“If I’m walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I’m interested in. I’ve jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I’ve always written poetry since I was a kid.”

― Stephen Hough

“For about four years, all I did was watch television. I suppose my parents should have stopped me.”

― Stephen Hough

“Most people spend their life trying to get away from Catholicism. Amazingly, I chose it.”

― Stephen Hough

“Brahms is life-changing every time. And though I love him, I can’t say that about Mompou.”

― Stephen Hough

“I enjoy painting. It’s an incredible release of tension, and I feel very excited doing it. I squeeze out some wonderful red paint, and I get a thrill. My heart starts beating faster. It’s almost a sensual thing working with these thick acrylic paints. I almost want to put my hands in.”

― Stephen Hough

“America has been central to my life.”

― Stephen Hough

“A priest once said to me, ‘Think of a priest going to the altar as you walk out on the stage.’ I would hate to think that anyone thought I was coming to preach. But art and music open up things that you can’t put into words. It’s about bringing joy when you go out there.”

― Stephen Hough

“The ‘Rhapsody’ has a lean, modern, American feel about it, whereas with Rachmaninoff’s second and third concertos, you feel very much you’re still in old imperial Russia.”

― Stephen Hough

“The hierarchy is set out for me. The first priority is piano. I have to be 101 percent prepared. I find that at other times of the day, if the creative juices are working, I might want to write or compose.”

― Stephen Hough

“I’ve loved Alfred Cortot’s playing from an early age, and I never tire of hearing his recordings, particularly Chopin and Schumann from the 1920s and ’30s.”

― Stephen Hough

“There are artists who delight listeners with their wild and daring individuality; there are others who uncover the written score with reverence. There are few who can do both.”

― Stephen Hough

“Restaurants should be forced to recycle their leftovers for animal consumption – and should create fewer leftovers in the first place.”

― Stephen Hough

“Unlike sport, music is not about winning or keeping fit or promoting your town or school; it’s about celebrating, to a level approaching ecstasy, the deepest human longings.”

― Stephen Hough

“Discovering how to spend leisure time well, especially during a time of austerity, could be as important in the effort to reduce crime as having extra police on the streets, and increasing the population of concert halls may actually help decrease the population of prisons.”

― Stephen Hough

“I was out of the U.K. as a care-free, fun-loving student for much of Mrs. Thatcher’s time in Downing Street, and as I didn’t own a television in New York, never read the newspapers, and am old enough to have lived before the Internet, she is a shadowy figure in my memory.”

― Stephen Hough

“Where prominent writers are expected to have a socially, politically responsible voice, musicians sometimes find meaning only in the voice which produces melodies with vocal chords.”

― Stephen Hough

“Before the 20th century, to be a successful musician was merely to be one who was employed. A few, such as Liszt, Paderewski and several singers, had phenomenally lucrative careers, but they were rare – and Liszt gave all of his money away, travelling by choice in a third-class rail carriage.”

― Stephen Hough

“Whether such socialism is foolish naivety or heroic idealism is a matter of opinion, but what is certain is that, however many CDs are sold or tours sold out, the sound waves themselves are free.”

― Stephen Hough

“I was such a lazy teenager: I didn’t read or play the piano beyond the bare minimum.”

― Stephen Hough

“I’m not really a professional composer; I just compose now and then when someone asks me to.”

― Stephen Hough

“I love listening to things like those wonderful piano pieces of Stockhausen. It’s just not my thing as a composer or performer, and thank goodness we’re not obliged to be Modernist any more.”

― Stephen Hough

“Before Liszt, a conductor was someone who just facilitated the performance, who would keep people together or beat the time, indicate the entries. After Liszt, that was no longer the case; a conductor was someone who shaped the music in an intense musical way, who played the orchestra as an instrument.”

― Stephen Hough

“I was only listening to rock music, burning joss sticks in my bedroom, wanting only to be a disc jockey, and watching six hours of television a night – the worst kind of teenage alienation.”

― Stephen Hough

“I just found the piano so fascinating and wonderful, and I begged my parents to buy me one. In the end, they bought me a toy piano and eventually an upright piano, and I started lessons.”

― Stephen Hough

“I think it all comes from the same source, really, the writing of music, the writing of words, the playing of music. It’s what drives anyone to be interested in the arts. I think it’s a poetic gene; it’s a wanting to go beyond.”

― Stephen Hough

“I think the actual art of expressing yourself is a very important part of being human. And an important part of being a performer is understanding what it’s like to create yourself.”

― Stephen Hough

“When you’re a kid, Beethoven is Beethoven, but as I’ve grown older, my astonishment at the sheer inventiveness of the man has increased, and I have an appreciation that I didn’t have when I was in my 20s.”

― Stephen Hough

“I don’t listen to music a lot in that I rarely sit down and put on a CD because I really want to treasure the silence that is there when I’m not practising. But when I listen to a piece, I listen to it often.”

― Stephen Hough

“I want music to move me, and I don’t think it can do that without at least a link to tonality. It’s the tug between atonal and tonal which makes music poignant.”

― Stephen Hough

“In the bit of painting that I’ve done, I’m interested in colour and texture. I’m very interested in transparency.”

― Stephen Hough

“The piano is an instrument that can easily sound overly thick, and I love to think that I can work with textures – particularly the inner textures inside the melody or the bass line. There is an analogy there with painting; I love paintings where you see colour underneath the colour and, underneath that, more texture and shape.”

― Stephen Hough

“I haven’t studied theology in any systematic way. I don’t think I’d find certain subjects – canon law, for instance – terribly interesting. But I’m always picking around and finding different things.”

― Stephen Hough

“I really feel something’s missing if I’m not writing.”

― Stephen Hough