Musicians

"I am proud to be Ukrainian."

"Over the years I felt call to motherland that sometimes I even wanted to cry because of nostalgia. You will not believe but my present flat is a real Ukrainian house. I collect embroidered towels and embroidered shirts. More and more often I recollect the words of Nina Matvienko, whom I respect a lot: "Where your navel is dug there you will always feel a call". And it is true."

"Trying to be better than someone else is a pure waste of time. Strive to be better than you were yesterday."

"When I was back there listening to Eric play and I thought, 'Gosh, I hate it when the warm up guy is better than I am.' He was great."

"The distance in form, intention, mood and expression between Schubert's songs for voice and piano and those of, say, Adele is remarkably small."

"Questo è il bacio di Tosca! (Floria Tosca)"

"Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma. (Floria Tosca)"

"Whatever the atmosphere he wanted to create, Giacomo Puccini’s sound world is unique and unmistakeable with its opulent yet clear-cut orchestration and a miraculous fund of melodies with their bittersweet, tender lyricism. His masterly writing for the voice guarantees the survival of his music for many years to come."

"in te ravviso --il sogno ch'io vorrei sempre sognar! (Rodolfo)"

"Ho tante cose che ti voglio dire, o una sola, ma grande come il mare, come il mare profonda ed infinita...Sei il mio amore e tutta la mia vita! (Mimì)"

"The main thing is not to lose your identity and to continue working ... You have a quartet. That is such joy! You can forget everything else in the world. I'm playing a lot of chamber music these days. Tomorrow we were going to give the first performance of two trios, but because of the mourning, all concerts have been canceled."

"I was three and a half years old when my father brought home a toy fiddle," playing "with which I am very happy fancies himself a street musician... I thought not and could not be happier than go from house to house with a violin "."

"When I think of myself in those years, it seems to me that I was playing quite freely and fluently, tonally pure. But there is still have many years of hard work over the sound, rhythm and dynamics. Of course, most importantly, a deep comprehension of the inner content."

"Oistrakh's playing was not so much marked by brilliance, but by richness, lyricism, roundness of tone; the unbelievable sharp and clear contact between string and bow, his ability to lengthen the bow stroke on even the shortest notes without the slightest tension, his beautifully fleshy, supple left hand capable of producing glorious vibrato together with an infinite variety of shades."

"Wagner exploited all forms of expression at a composer's disposal -- harmony, dynamics, orchestration -- to the extreme. His music is highly emotional, and at the same time Wagner has extraordinary control over the effect he achieves. That's why there is also something manipulative about Wagner's music, which is not to say that it's not honest. In fact, I believe that it's totally honest, but it also happens to be manipulative."

"considered the principle of equality and the pursuit of peace as the bedrock of the society they were building. What happened? ... I still believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, nothing has really changed since 2004. Instead, we now have a law that confirms the Arab population as . It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid. I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that. That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today."

"The thing about Wagner is we’re always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites … There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can’t represent both views on stage at once."

"I have lived as a Jew in Berlin for the past 23 years, something that would not have been possible if I did not believe that the Germans had thought long and hard about their past. No one else has managed to do this to the extent the Germans have, and I admire them for it."

"Every musician here has played these pieces many times, sometimes hundreds of times. Yesterday we looked at this music as if we had seen it for the first time. We never accept that the next note will played the same way it was played before. Thinking anew is our daily activity. I hope all the people of this region can take note of that."

"To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations."

"I am a Palestinian ..… and an Israeli … So you see it is possible to be both. … Everyone has to understand that the Palestinian cause is a just cause therefore it can be only given justice if it is achieved without violence. Violence can only weaken the righteousness of the Palestinian cause."

"Israel's lasting future depends on its government's willingness to enter into a genuine peace agreement with the Palestinians. That this also goes for the Palestinians grouped around Hamas hardly needs to be stressed. Both sides have to understand that they must live together for better or worse and that hatred, terror and territorial, ethnic and religious exclusion have never produced peace, but rather have led to killing and more killing."

"Music has the capacity to create a greater reality."

"I think it’s obvious that Wagner’s anti-Semitic views and writings are monstrous. There is no way around that. And I must say that if I, in a naïvely sentimental way, try to think which of the great composers of the past I would love to spend twenty-four hours with, if I could, Wagner doesn’t come to mind. I’d love to follow Mozart around for twenty-four hours; I’m sure it would be very entertaining, amusing, edifying, but Wagner… Wagner? I might invite him to dinner for study purposes, but not for enjoyment. Wagner, the person, is absolutely appalling, despicable, and, in a way, very difficult to put together with the music he wrote, which so often has exactly the opposite kind of feelings. It is noble, generous, etc. But now we are entering into the whole discussion of whether it is moral or not and this becomes too involved in a discussion. But suffice it to say for now that Wagner’s anti-Semitism was monstrous. That he used a lot of, at the time, common terminology for what could be described as salon anti-Semitism, and that he had all sorts of rationalizations about it, does not make it any less monstrous. He also used some abominable phrases which can be, at best, interpreted as being said in the heat of the moment — that Jews should be burned, etc. Whether he meant these things figuratively or not can be discussed. The fact remains that he was a monstrous anti-Semite. How we would look at the monstrous anti-Semitism without the Nazis, I don’t know. One thing I do know is that they, the Nazis, used, misused, and abused Wagner’s ideas or thoughts — I think this has to be said — beyond what he might have had in mind. Anti-Semitism was not invented by Adolf Hitler and it was certainly not invented by Richard Wagner. It existed for generations and generations and centuries before. The difference between National Socialism and the earlier forms of anti-Semitism is that the Nazis were the first, to my knowledge, to evolve a systematic plan to exterminate the Jews, the whole people. And I don’t think, although Wagner’s anti-Semitism is monstrous, that he can be made responsible for that, even though a lot of the Nazi thinkers, if you want to call them that, often quoted Wagner as their precursor. It also needs to be said for clarity’s sake that, in the operas themselves, there is not one Jewish character. There is not one anti-Semitic remark. There is nothing in any one of the ten great operas of Wagner even remotely approaching a character like Shylock."

"I must tell you, that when I came back from Ramallah in September, I really felt I had done something good. For many of these Palestinian children, it was the first time they ever had a positive thought about anything to do with Israel. I asked one young girl, 'Are you glad I came?'. And she said, 'Yes, because until now I only saw Israeli tanks and Israeli soldiers, and now I see an Israeli musician'"

"The Declaration of Independence was a source of inspiration to believe in ideals that transformed us from Jews to Israelis. ... I am asking today with deep sorrow: Can we, despite all our achievements, ignore the intolerable gap between what the Declaration of Independence promised and what was fulfilled, the gap between the idea and the realities of Israel? Does the condition of occupation and domination over another people fit the Declaration of Independence? Is there any sense in the independence of one at the expense of the fundamental rights of the other? Can the Jewish people whose history is a record of continued suffering and relentless persecution, allow themselves to be indifferent to the rights and suffering of a neighboring people? Can the State of Israel allow itself an unrealistic dream of an ideological end to the conflict instead of pursuing a pragmatic, humanitarian one based on social justice. I believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. I have always believed that there is no military solution to the Jewish Arab conflict, neither from a moral nor a strategic one and since a solution is therefore inevitable I ask myself, why wait?"

"Despite the fact that as an art, music cannot compromise its principles, and politics, on the other hand, is the art of compromise, when politics transcends the limits of the present existence and ascents to the higher sphere of the possible, it can be joined there by music. Music is the art of the imaginary par excellence, an art free of all limits imposed by words, an art that touches the depth of human existence, and art of sounds that crosses all borders. As such, music can take the feelings and imagination of Israelis and Palestinians to new unimaginable spheres."

"His exceptional musical talent was already evident then and he has since developed into one of the the preeminent conductors of our time"

"I live in Germany with great concern. Today, there is a highly dangerous new anti-Semitism in Germany, and reactions to this fact, both in society and politics, are far too weak. In the early 1990s I would not have believed that anti-Semitism and xenophobia, glorification of the Nazi past and an aggressive, racial nationalism could become socially acceptable again in Germany in 2019. What is happening every day in Germany cannot be brushed away as “alarm signals”; it is far too late for those. We must condemn and countermand anti-Semitism and xenophobia roundly and jointly, every day. For there are many aspects of German culture I value greatly: literature, music and philosophy, for example. Nazism, however, does not represent the human values this German culture is founded upon. Nazism is inhuman. Before I end, permit me to say a few words on another subject which fills me with concern: in Israel, it is currently unclear how the next government will be formed. No matter how the new government turns out, however, Israelis must finally understand that their own security is inextricably linked to justice for the Palestinian people, which is so urgently needed. There can only be true and lasting peace if the unjust occupation of the Palestinian territories finally ends."

"I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through. And yet even they have differing positions … I respect that there are survivors who can't, and certainly don't want to, listen to this music. But I don't accept that the fact that an orchestra playing Wagner in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem would do any harm to someone sitting in an apartment in Haifa."

"I'm sure that there are many Israelis who dream of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone. And there are many Palestinians who dream of going to bed at night and waking up the next morning to find the Israelis gone."

"As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and written — together and apart — the events of our lives as if they were songs, and I guess they were. When news of Jacques’ death came I stayed locked in my bedroom and drank for a week. That kind of self pity was something he wouldn’t have approved of, but all I could do was replay our songs (our children) and ruminate over our unfinished life together."

"If we only have love We can melt all the guns And then give the new world To our daughters and sons.If we only have love Then Jerusalem stands And then death has no shadow There are no foreign lands."

"If we only have love We will never bow down We'll be tall as the pines Neither heroes nor clowns. If we only have love Then we'll only be men And we'll drink from the Grail To be born once again; Then with nothing at all But the little we are We'll have conquered all time All space, the sun, and the stars!"

"If we only have love Then tomorrow will dawn And the days of our years Will rise on that morn."

"Adieu, Francoise, my trusted wife; Without you I'd have had a lonely life. You cheated lots of times but then, I forgave you in the end Though your lover was my friend.Adieu, Francoise, it's hard to die When all the birds are singing in the sky. Now that spring is in the air With your lovers ev'rywhere, Just be careful; I'll be there."

"If we only have love We can reach those in pain We can heal all our wounds We can use our own names."

"the early trauma of Begum Akhtar’s life resulted in the singer being consumed by melancholy. She always felt a deep vacuum in her life and lived in constant fear of “Ya Allah, ab kya hoga?” (Oh god, what next?)."

"A striking example [Poetry and Music] is Begum Akhtar who used sounds borrowed from language with such amazing skill. In her utterance the flowing lines of the vowel became graceful arches, and the hard consonants, supporting pillars. The edifice is then animated by vast range of hard, soft, nasal, throaty, sibilant and breathy sounds which became an integral part of her musical calligraphy. She is commonly thought of a ghazal singer,..."

"Her forte was not necessarily the audibility of her music, for she had a defective area where her voice cracked at a high-pitch, with a limited one-octave range, but she turned it into her virtue for she knew how to mould her voice."

"Begum Akhtar is a classic example of how personal tragedy is often that differentiating edge between a great performer and a truly exceptional one."

"She had lovers and, if the secret must be out, she drank. What else accounts for the naughtiness of her eyes? Like so many tawaifs (geishas, courtesans) there were ups and downs in her childhood, the father leaving the mother and so on, but she was blessed with the divine gift and her art transcended the various accidents of her life. In the end all else was forgotten. Only the legend and the accomplishment survive."

"People don't want to listen to an imitation. If they want to listen to my style, they will go and buy my records."

"Today it's a challenge for me to sing with her portrait looking at me. Begum Akhtar's voice was a blessing and would touch the hearts of all."

"...her taseer (soulful sound) was the result of years of loneliness, pain, suppression and silence."

"I stumbled across a concert performance of the Begum singing Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Aaye kuch abr kuch sharab aaye, uss ke baad aaye jo azaab aaye” and I have been in a trance ever since."

"We live in an age where people are constantly trying to find remedies for pain, instead of learning how to sublimate it into divine music, the way Begum Akhtar did. For, the mercurial diva from Lucknow sang the poetry of Ghalib and many others in a manner that would make even pain seem desirable."

"As a tawaif, she was trained to charm the system and subvert narrow patriarchal practices by means of highly sophisticated seduction. At another level, she was a hapless victim, constantly tormented by the twists and turns of her own destiny. She braved on regardless, driven by a deep inner quest to pursue love in its purest form, as an end in itself; be it in music or in life."

"...singing sensation in the Indian subcontinent, feted by the cognoscenti and the commoner alike."

"Begum Akhtar's life perhaps mirrors an image where we too may briefly perceive ourselves and question the veracity of our own lives."