A conductor should guide rather than command.
Riccardo Muti

All the conductor has to do is stand back and try not to get in the way. Mozart is doing all the work.
Colin R. Davis

And at the same time, I had my very first concert at the age of 16. I hadn't heard a symphony orchestra before, and I was so deeply impressed I said I have to be a conductor.
Kurt Masur

And if you are strong enough, then you can grow as a conductor more and more.
Kurt Masur

Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations.
Gunther Schuller

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.
Michael Tilson Thomas

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
Igor Stravinsky

Great cataclysmic things can go by and neither the orchestra nor the conductor are under the delusion that whether they make this or that gesture is going to be the deciding factor in how it comes out.
James Levine

I always imagined that to bring an orchestra to play together is not enough for a conductor.
Kurt Masur

I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry.
Leon Theremin

I don't feel that the conductor has real power. The orchestra has the power, and every member of it knows instantaneously if you're just beating time.
Itzhak Perlman

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.
Franz Liszt

I like to create the music I hear in my interior. As a conductor, you have the ability to squeeze the sounds and interpretation you asked for from 50 to 80 people.
Eberhard Weber

I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.
Harriet Tubman

In South America, I heard the 8th Symphony of Beethoven. And the young conductor thought, Beethoven must be heroic. But this is piece which shouldn't be heroic. And this was such a misunderstanding, such a deep misunderstanding.
Kurt Masur

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?
John Philip Sousa

Musical practice is too young an art in America to warrant a search for men with a conductor's gift.
Anton Seidl

Only when every one of us and every nation learns the secret of love for all mankind will the world become a great orchestra, following the beat of the Greatest Conductor of all.
Artur Rodzinski

Show me an orchestra that likes its conductor and I'll show you a lousy conductor.
Goddard Lieberson

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.
Ruggiero Ricci