[A] knowledge of Bach is the beginning of musical wisdom.

But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach.
Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness.

Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day is something new, fantastic, unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!

I love Bach, I listened to him for 25 years, all my life, so I never get tired of Bach. And to learn Bach and play it is such a joy, even if no one ever hears it, just to play it sitting alone at home it makes you feel good, it's like a form of meditation. You can play it over and over and never get tired of it, it's a miracle. Bach I think is the greatest of all western musicians. Probably most people come to that conclusion. (laughs)

I myself represent the style of a Bach who was a human being with all his heights and depths, who knew life very well. My Bach is the experience of my playing the whole literature; and filling the different voices with their own life, vitality, vividness; it’s the independent speaking-until-singing of the different voices; and lastly it’s a balance between pianistic virtuosity and something chamber-music-like.

I've played Bach since I was a little girl. I can't let a day go by without playing him. He's so witty and secretive and funny and mathematical and brilliant.

My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand mathematics and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common.

From Bad Boy of Music, on his life as a concert pianist:

My ambition was to live like music.

To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation.

As a contrast to the Bach of pure music I present the Bach who is a poet and painter in sound. In his music and in his texts he expresses the emotional as well as the descriptive with great vitality and clarity. Before all else he aims at rendering the pictorial in lines of sound. He is even more tone painter than tone poet. His art is nearer to that of Berlioz than to that of Wagner. If the text speaks of drifting mists, of boisterous winds, of roaring rivers, of waves that ebb and flow, of leaves falling from the tree, of bells that toll for the dying, of the confident faith that walks with firm steps or the weak faith that falters, of the proud who will be debased and the humble who will be exalted, of Satan rising in rebellion, of angels on the clouds of heaven, then one sees and hears all this in his music. Bach has, in fact, his own language of sound. There are in his music constantly recurring rhythmical motives expressing peaceful bliss, lively joy, intense pain, or sorrow sublimely borne. The impulse to express poetic and pictorial concepts is the essence of music. It addresses itself to the listener's creative imagination and seeks to kindle in him the feelings and visions with which the music was composed. But this it can do only if the person who uses the language of sound possesses the mysterious faculty of rendering thoughts with a superior clarity and precision. In this respect Bach is the greatest of the great.

To approach Bach, one has to realize that 100 years after Bach’s death, Bach and his music totally had been forgotten. Even while he was still alive, Bach himself believed in the polyphonic power and the resulting symmetric architectures of well-proportioned music. But this had been an artificial truth - even for him. Other composers, including his sons, already composed in another style, where they found other ideals and brought them to new solutions. The spirit of the time already had changed while Bach was still alive. A hundred years later, it was Mendelssohn who about 1850 discovered Bach anew with the performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Now a new renaissance began, and the world learned to know the greatness of Bach. To become acquainted with Bach, many transcriptions were done. But the endeavors in rediscovering Bach had been - stylistically - in a wrong direction. Among these were the orchestral transcriptions of Leopold Stokowski, and the organ interpretations of the multitalented Albert Schweitzer, who, one has to confess, had a decisive effect on the rediscovery of Bach. All performances had gone in the wrong direction: much too romantic, with a false knowledge of historic style, the wrong sound, the wrong rubato, and so on. The necessity of artists like Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould - again 100 years later - has been understandable: The radicalism of Glenn Gould pointed out the real clarity and the internal explosions of the power-filled polyphony in the best way. This extreme style, called by many of his critics refrigerator interpretations, however really had been necessary to demonstrate the right strength to bring out the architecture in the right manner, which had been lost so much before. I’m convinced that the style Glenn Gould played has been the right answer. But there has been another giant: it was no less than Helmut Walcha who, also beginning in the 1950, started his legendary interpretations for the DG-Archive productions of the complete organ-work cycle on historic organs (Silbermann, Arp Schnitger). Also very classical in strength of speed and architectural proportions, he pointed out the polyphonic structures in an enlightened but moreover especially humanistic way, in a much more smooth and elegant way than Glenn Gould on the piano. Some years later it was Virgil Fox who acquainted the U.S. with tours of the complete Bach cycle, which certainly was effective in its own way, but much more modern than Walcha. The ranges of Bach interpretations had become wide, and there were the defenders of the historical style and those of the much more modern romantic style. Also the performances of the orchestral and cantata Bach had become extreme: on one side, for example, Karl Richter, who used a big and rich-toned orchestra; on the other side Helmut Rilling, whose Bach was much more historically oriented.

Listening to that performance changed my life. It changed the course of my musical career. I could listen to my heart's voice clearly because the music had helped me understand my mind's deepest desires. Today, I am happy and feel blessed that I followed the path dictated by my heart.

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that -- its humanity.