DANIEL BARENBOIM

'We live in a society which works against what we are trying to do. It exploits everything - life is aggressive. I want to have time to relearn and study. The great masterpieces of the repertory are still new after ten or twenty performances - a whole lifetime is not enough. People questioned me when I played [Beethoven's] Hammerklavier Sonata at fourteen - "too young," they said. Of course, I couldn't probe it all, but neither can some sixty-year-olds! There are those who say some music is only for maturity, but it only matures when you play and study and repeat it. Maturity is to realise that it is never finished. I'll never forget how the score of the Hammerklavier shocked me the first time I looked at it. Every time I play it now, I have that same shock. I can never forget the impact of the first time I heard a work - that first reaction is as important as one twenty years later.'

- from Reverberations © Robert Jacobson 1975