“When we look at musical life in Germany, we must realise that it does not produce anything special.

What is it suffering from?

From national institutionalisation.

It is the same phenomenon that we saw in communism: local authorities and the state took over the economy and art – and what was the result?

Nothing!

We didn’t notice so much with art. But in the economy the national exertion of influence showed itself incorruptibly in the balance sheets: The communist countries were bankrupt.

The state with its functionary and clique system can only give a mediocre performance, and in the economy this becomes very quickly apparent.

But we have the same case in classical German music: every position that is strategically important is filled with national institutions, the people employed there are paid by the state, and so in the end the state decides on the absurd examination regulations and standards as to what classical music is and/or should be.

A load of eunuchs cannot father a child, everybody knows that – that is what one would think, anyway. A normal man can father many children.

But the musical experts who are financed by the state do not want to admit that the same applies to art, and music in particular – that the mediocre, the common cannot produce the exceptional – the reason probably being their own payment.

The music institutions established by the state, be it educational institutions or some sort of supposedly supportive institutions are based in their function on artistic mediocrity. No artist who is really inspired – whether he is a composer or an interpreter – would sell himself to be employed as a professor by the state.

And a really talented artist would never imagine that he could teach a student something in an artistic respect.

The existence of the artistic teaching profession reveals to me the same presumptuousness with which some technocrats think they need to support nature with some sort of patents and products.

Artistic talent is solely a matter of nature and/or the Creator – just as creating great pieces of art is only possible with nature’s help, and only through direct instructions by the Creator.

The idea of the artistic subject in music appears to me like pure scorn compared to nature and its Creator, and has the same value as atheism does in religion.