Arrau talking about playing wrong notes

Here is an interesting exchange between Arrau and Joseph Horowitz in the book Arrau on Music and Performance.

J H / Busoni and Carreño were the two pianists who influenced you most?

C A / Those two. Carreño more than d’Albert [one of Carreño's husbands], because he never practiced. He used to have a big technique. Then he started losing interest in piano playing in order to compose. And yet his performance of the Liszt sonata was still marvelous. Full of wrong notes, and missed passages. But the feeling was wonderful—coordinating the whole thing, with each idea coming out of the one before.

How Teresa Carreño gets practice time

One of the books that I dip into from time to time is Arrau on Music and Performance, written by Joseph Horowitz. Just today I picked up something that I missed when reading it the first time around, and that is Arrau’s reporting of a comment made by the great Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño. She had five children with three husbands and a common-law partner. Arrau met her after one of her concerts, and she said, “Oh, with all the children we have it’s so difficult to practice. I have a loaded gun on my piano. And I have threatened all my children—if they open the door, I shoot.”