Édouard Risler and Lucien Capet the Frenchmen, Toscanini the Italian, bringing Beethoven in its purest form to Germany; the miracles that the non-Latin Koussevitzky works with a score like Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe; a purebred New Englander like George Copeland or the German Gieseking capturing the very essence of Debussy’s impressionism; Bruno Walter re-creating for us the devout Catholic mysticism of Bruckner – all these men proved to me that, especially in our domain, racial and national theories and prejudices that proclaim the predisposition of any one race or nation toward a given realm of art are completely invalidated. << less