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"When you go out onto the stage, all the preparation has to be forced into your subconscious. For the moment of the performance, we all have to return to a new level of unconsciousness. All the reflection and all the doubts have to be laid aside before you start."
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"Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics."
"He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous."
"It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance."
"The place trembled with sound. I didn't need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be careful. Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false word. You could never underestimate an audience. They had paid to get in; they had paid for drinks; they intended to get something and if you didn't give it to them they'd run you right into the ocean."
"Secular artists see themselves with performance; they are more self involved, presentational."
"I always wanted, and still aspire, to be something more than just one thing, just one performance."
"I'm not saying that more performance wouldn't be better - all these technologies are going to get better - that's the difference between first generation and second generation."
"Good directing is about getting the performance to be just what's right for the movie."
"As the director of an opera, it is my responsibility to unify the style of the particular performance, but one can certainly approach the piece from different points of view. That's what makes it interesting and keeps it alive."
"Then certainly for a musician timing becomes something that is immediately accessible as a concept, because it's a necessity in ones everyday performance."
Explore more quotes by Dietrich Fischer Dieskau
"You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things."
"It's not all that different with the orchestra. There are orchestras that seem to be encased in dough, so that first you have to break through the normal routine, and clear out the openings."
"The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form."
"And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away."
"What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out."
"Admittedly, it is really our duty, as artists, to hold up a mirror to our own era; but, on the other hand, these works have lives of their own, and they're still alive today."
"Particularly at around the age of 70 you reach a stage where you have to be very careful. If, at that point, you abandon the work you have been doing, there is a good chance that you will just collapse and drift."
"Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plow. The trick is just to wake thmem up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music."
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