Success Quote by Walter Legge

Legge’s line is a scalpel aimed at the comforting myth that art can be improved by consensus. “Convinced” signals more than opinion: it’s the hard-earned certainty of someone who watched masterpieces get diluted into compromises. The target isn’t collaboration itself; it’s the committee as a machine for risk-aversion, for sanding down the sharp edges that make art feel alive. In the arts, the thing most worth protecting is precisely what a committee can’t process: a single, stubborn, taste-driven judgment.

The subtext is managerial and psychological. Committees exist to distribute responsibility, which means they also distribute blame. In commerce, that’s a feature. In culture, it becomes a bug: the safest decision is rarely the most interesting one, and “useful” tends to mean defensible on paper rather than incandescent onstage. Legge is effectively arguing that accountability is aesthetic. Great programming, casting, commissioning, or recording requires a person willing to be wrong in public.

Context matters because Legge wasn’t merely theorizing. As a dominant figure in classical recording (and a notorious tastemaker), he operated in a world where repertory choices, performer selection, and interpretive approaches could be argued to death by well-meaning experts. His career rewarded decisive curatorship: pick the artist, pick the take, commit. The quote doubles as self-justification - a principled defense of the impresario model - but it also lands as a warning. When institutions let process replace vision, they don’t become more democratic; they become more timid.