[...] . The force comes from the stomach, don’t cheat with your posture. There’s no instrument, never will be, that can render the dynamism Beethoven imagined in his silent world. See, now it sounds lovely. You who have so much beauty in you, you must learn to bring it out. Let’s go on then. Here you have a premonition of what will happen to us twenty-nine bars later; you hardly notice it, but it’s important. No padding in Beethoven, he speaks persuasively, furiously, sorrowfully, cheerfully, painfully, never mumbling. You mustn’t mumble, never produce common stuff! You must know what you want even if it’s wrong. Meaning and context. Go ahead now. That doesn’t mean everything has to be emphasized; there’s a differencebetween emphasis and significance. Now let’s go on, be patient, practise patience. When you want to stop, you have to connect up to a special battery that doubles your effort. There’s nothing so awful as a guilty conscience in art. Stop there. A C. My friend Horowitz went to the piano every morning after breakfast and played a number of C-major chords. He said he was washing his ears.’

I listened to Andrea and thought about theatre, about myself and actors, our sloppiness, our ignorance, the damned common stuff we produce in exchange for payment.