Dohnanyi: My advice to young conductors

From an interview with Bruce Duffie in 2005:

Many young conductors come up and ask for advice.  It is hard, you know.  The first thing is that real talent needs not so much advice.  It needs the talent of copying first.  Copying is a practice which is not really regarded as something which is important in art, but it’s very important in the beginning that you are able to copy.  So if you have a real great chef as a conductor, somebody you really admire, you should first try to get close to what he is doing, and learn how he’s doing things.  Once you get over this, it’s like a painting.  Most of the great painters — people like Goya, and so on — started copying other pictures, and finally developed their own style.  Nowadays it seems that everybody has to be very original from the very beginning — to be too slow, or too fast, or too nothing.  It is more important to try to get close by going the route other people went….

Continues here.

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