Art & Creativity Quote by Lorin Maazel

Maazel turns “classical music” into something bigger than an art form: a national instrument for moral repair. The key move is the opening diagnosis, “confused times,” a deliberately broad foghorn that lets listeners pour in their own anxieties - political polarization, cultural fragmentation, the sense that public life has lost a shared pitch. Against that drift, he offers classical music as a stabilizer, “at the very core” of a “struggle” to “reassert” values. That vocabulary is telling: not celebrate, not explore, but reassert - a word that assumes loss, slippage, and the need for institutional force to pull culture back into line.

The subtext is a defense of cultural legitimacy at a moment when elite art often has to justify its funding and relevance. As a conductor who lived inside major orchestras and their donor ecosystems, Maazel is also making a strategic argument: classical music deserves protection because it stands for “ethical values,” not just aesthetic pleasure. It’s a bid to move the conversation from taste to civic necessity.

There’s a second, sharper undertone in the appeal to being “honored and respected outside our shores.” National prestige becomes a measuring stick, implying that cultural capital functions like diplomacy: orchestras as soft power, repertoire as a passport. The phrase “have always characterized our country” is less a historical claim than a myth-making tactic, smoothing over messy contradictions to present tradition as moral inheritance.

The quote works because it weaponizes nostalgia without sounding sentimental, framing culture as infrastructure - something you maintain, or you lose the ability to recognize yourselves.