Simon Rattle Quotes

“Always the journey, never the destination.”

― Simon Rattle

“Orchestras are like people. They’re the sonic embodiment of their community.”

― Simon Rattle

“Yes, I was a weird duck, no doubt.”

― Simon Rattle

“What really counts isn’t whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it’s your mindset.”

― Simon Rattle

“I think we will find more and more ways in which technology invades our artistic spaces, so music is something you will need more than ever because it is there in time and in space and for that moment only.”

― Simon Rattle

“Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.”

― Simon Rattle

“Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires.”

― Simon Rattle

“Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable.”

― Simon Rattle

“Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.”

― Simon Rattle

“I think Beethoven means dissonances to be more stressed than consonances – it’s the shock tactician in him.”

― Simon Rattle

“The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians – we don’t listen to our own music for relaxation.”

― Simon Rattle

“The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around.”

― Simon Rattle

“I’ve always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano.”

― Simon Rattle

“The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.”

― Simon Rattle

“With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven’t started three years before, I’m screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together.”

― Simon Rattle

“My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is, of course, why I’m not a great conductor.”

― Simon Rattle

“If you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you’re in big trouble.”

― Simon Rattle

“As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again?”

― Simon Rattle

“Conductors make too much fuss about conductors! Humility and hard work are virtues. We’re nothing without our musicians.”

― Simon Rattle

“Oh Lord… I don’t really do pride.”

― Simon Rattle

“I am old enough to remember the enormous fight over Tate Modern. It is such a part of our cultural landscape now, we forget the opposition to it.”

― Simon Rattle

“In England, unless I am mistaken, I think some of the politicians who love classical music and opera are a bit loath to be seen there in case people think it is elitist. That is a real shame because it also means we are not allowing our politicians a hinterland that an earlier generation, a Denis Healey, would have taken for granted.”

― Simon Rattle

“I was thrilled that Sadiq Khan was so in support of the idea of culture being at the centre of a city and the idea that it is everyone’s right. It can’t be a matter of privilege or chance. It should be something everyone can have in their life, and that means knowing what it is.”

― Simon Rattle

“I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it.”

― Simon Rattle

“Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it’s a blessing. It makes them cautious.”

― Simon Rattle

“American economists can’t understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis. They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course – ‘Why can’t they agree with us?’ I would have thought it was fairly obvious.”

― Simon Rattle

“As a nation, we English tend to be self-deprecating, looking down on ourselves. We’re insular but also flexible, whereas in Germany, it’s a case of besser wissen – we know better. That’s very Deutsch. People are never frightened to tell you what you’re doing wrong, in a way that would never happen in England.”

― Simon Rattle

“The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest.”

― Simon Rattle

“I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been.”

― Simon Rattle

“’Pelleas et Melisande’ is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively.”

― Simon Rattle

“Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing.”

― Simon Rattle

“I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach.”

― Simon Rattle

“If you receive a whole string of bad reviews, you have to say, ‘O.K., maybe there’s something here we should pay attention to.’”

― Simon Rattle

“You don’t like Liverpool: you either loathe it or you love it. And I don’t know anyone who loathes it and comes from it.”

― Simon Rattle

“In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music.”

― Simon Rattle

“As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles’ question, ‘Will you still need me when I’m 64?’”

― Simon Rattle

“’Career’ is not a musical term.”

― Simon Rattle

“’Parsifal’ is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.”

― Simon Rattle

“Conducting ‘Tristan’ is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange.”

― Simon Rattle

“Nobody has Francis Bacon on their walls in their house – or very few people – but sometimes people listen to Beethoven as though it was background and a comfort, and I think that is very dangerous.”

― Simon Rattle

“Beethoven was always too much. He’s not slightly anything – he’s very everything.”

― Simon Rattle

“We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music.”

― Simon Rattle

“You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football.”

― Simon Rattle

“We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn’t just be high priests of music.”

― Simon Rattle

“I’ve always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.”

― Simon Rattle

“Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day – they are inexhaustible treasures.”

― Simon Rattle

“It’s interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.”

― Simon Rattle

“I’d be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.”

― Simon Rattle

“The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it.”

― Simon Rattle

“There are a few great orchestras in the world, thank goodness. Although some people do put them in ranking order, it’s not like a snooker match. Each orchestra has different things to offer.”

― Simon Rattle

“One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I’ll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language.”

― Simon Rattle

“Every orchestra has its own sound.”

― Simon Rattle

“There is a mysterious way in which orchestras keep a sense of their history and what they’ve done. I still listen to the L.A. Philharmonic and feel that Giulini was there.”

― Simon Rattle

“I believe if you’re not completely in love with what you’re doing, you’d better find another profession.”

― Simon Rattle

“One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.”

― Simon Rattle

“I first heard Mahler’s second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor.”

― Simon Rattle

“My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people.”

― Simon Rattle