I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee.
If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.
But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.
Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.
My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.
It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work.
Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect.
I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture.
I don't use old music.
I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.
Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.
