From a fellow music lover:  

Listening to an old interview with harpsichordist Wanda Landowska from her home in Connecticut in her advanced years, I was struck by the beauty of her words expressed in English, which she also had mastered with a charming accent: 

“Perfection is something very cold. A human being cannot be perfect… performed culture cannot be perfect…. It would be stupidly modest if I would say that I am not successful because I have obtained victory for my instrument and for my art — and for the idea of my art. Of course I am successful. It doesn’t mean that I am very delighted by myself. Not at all.

 

I think that I have very much to learn, and as long as I live I am going to work very hard, more and more than ever. I hate the idea of perfection, as I said to you, and of practicing.

To work, to play with all your heart and intensity, this is important. (Of course you have to prepare [your fingers….]) I try to be as true as I can. I love my music, for this is the most important thing: to love something in life, to love, to be in love with something….

 

If I would not be in love with my music, what could I do? Nothing….

 

And this is the most important: people who have nothing in their souls, they are fools, but a man or a woman who has a conviction that something is beautiful and something is profound, this helps him to overcome his grief, his bad, very sad hours, and we have them plenty in our lives.”