“Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.”

— Georg Solti

Conductors by John L. Holmes (1988) pp 256-261 ISBN 0-575-04088-2

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Do you have more details about the quote "Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense." by Georg Solti?

Georg Solti 5

Hungarian orchestral and operatic conductor 1912–1997

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: It is precisely through one's learning about the total context in which the language of a subject is expressed that personality may be altered. If one learns how to speak history or mathematics or literary criticism, one becomes, by definition, a different person. The point to be stressed is that a subject is a situation in which and through which people conduct themselves, largely in language. You cannot learn a new form of conduct without changing yourself.

“A lot of musicians are going to have to retrain. It's nonsense to say that traditional classical music is more complex. Contemporary pieces by Harrison Birtwistle are much harder to play than Mozart or Wagner. I know a lot of people don't want to hear that.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Mail on Sunday, 06/02/2000
On Classical Music

“You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man's actions are, such must be his spirit.”

Démosthenés (-384–-322 BC) ancient greek statesman and orator

As quoted in Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 1‎ (1940), p. 472

“A doctrine is something that pins you down to a given mode of conduct and dozens of situations which you cannot foresee, which is a great mistake in principle.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

As quoted in "George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq" at History News Network (26 September 2002)
Context: A doctrine is something that pins you down to a given mode of conduct and dozens of situations which you cannot foresee, which is a great mistake in principle. When the word ‘containment’ was used in my ‘X’ article, it was used with relation to a certain situation then prevailing, and as a response to it.

“You cannot wage war with sentimentality. The more ruthlessly war is conducted, the more merciful is it in fact, for it finishes the war the sooner.”

Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and president of Germany

Remark (November 1914), Paul Dehn, Hindenburg, als Erzieher (1918), p. 12, quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 74
Supreme Commander of All German Forces in the East

“Let this be one invariable rule of your conduct—never to show the least symptom of resentment, which you cannot, to a certain degree, gratify; but always to smile, where you cannot strike.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

26 March 1754
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

“You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.”

Elizabeth Gilbert Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Source: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F 81
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.142

“Nature has but one judgment on wrong conduct — if you can call that a judgment which seemingly has no reference to conduct as such — the judgment of death.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Address at the dedication of the Northwestern University Law School Building, Chicago, Illinois (20 October 1902); republished in Holmes' Collected Legal Papers (1937), p. 272.
1900s

“Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.”

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Georg Solti 5

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