Mozart is always a bit of a challenge - you know, even though it is often given to very young singers, it is actually the most complicated to sing in many instances.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
For anyone who doesn't have that connection with Mozart, I urge those people to go and find some of his music, because it can quite genuinely make you just glad to be alive.
When I started, my teachers told me that I had to sing 'Mozart, Mozart, Mozart.' I said, 'No, I want to sing all the other stuff.' If you do not push yourself, you will stay the same. Maybe some singers are happy with that, but I have to move, I have to do something new always.
It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.
Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
Because of Mozart, it's all over after the age of seven.
Mozart had a tremendously fertile and creative ear for a catchy tune.
Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak.
If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.
Mozart is my first strength.