Chopin Quotations

Chopin suffered from melancholia -- what today would be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, ... And by the end of their time together Sand was his caretaker, his nursemaid, and she'd had enough. But she was a crucial force in his life -- the person who gave him a home, a family.

But Mozart has a whole different set of challenges. Mozart requires a particular sense of sound, and getting that sound out of a modern instrument after you have had years of playing Chopin and Liszt and big works like that, then Mozart becomes in a sense harder.

I used to get into the government car and switch on Chopin or someone I liked to hear at the end of a parliamentary day.

One could run these automata for trillions or even trillions of trillions of iterations, and the image would remain at the same limited level of complexity. They do not evolve into, say, insects, or humans, or Chopin preludes.

I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.

Mazurkas are often badly played, and I hope that my training and experience of Chopin will give my interpretations an authentic and musically truthful insight into these enigmatic compositions.