The first "Elly Ney Trio", 1916
Fritz Reitz (Cello), Willem van Hoogstraten (Violin) & Elly Ney

• Only what we strive for wholeheartedly, what we pursue unerringly with single-minded devotion, can ever ripen into a reality.
  
  
• If the artist does not learn to overcome his subjective human desires and approach the work of art from an objective and purely intellectual point of view, his performances will never be able to reflect the essential originality of a true creative work.
  
  
• What use are musical training or musical talent if the motivating energy that leads to performance does not flow from the mind and heart?
  
  
• When people listening to music have a memorable experience, this happens because the inmost essence of the music is not only sensed by the performer but comes alive through the power and quality of the music itself.
  
  
• Since culture is a state of mind, character, heart and soul, a melody by one of our great composers can be more significant than knowledge is capable of making us realise.
  
  
• A genuine artistic utterance is given universal validity and vitality through the power of life and love.
  
  
• Self-interest and ambition stand in the way of true, pure artistic achievement.
  
  
• Any artist who can remain indifferent when the public is presented with pseudo-art, mediocre or indeed even deleterious artistic offerings; any who shies away from the weary battle against wrong-headedness through lethargy or for the sake of a quiet life, has no awareness of the responsibility that goes hand in hand with talent. It is mainly egotistical self-absorption that destroys the ability to discriminate and produces the failure to speak out, whether from caution or from weakness, thereby stifling genuine values in favour of false ones.
  
  
• Goethe said: "It is necessary to speak the truth because we constantly hear errors being preached."
  The cultural education of children must be started in the very early years of life.
  
  
• If a responsible home environment takes care to ensure that whatever a child hears and sees is good, then that child will automatically grow up into a cultural atmosphere which will quickly enable it to assimilate a wider world of experience and open its mind and heart to what is of real worth in life. The ability to discriminate then develops quite naturally. Taught knowledge and technique can only acquire value through these first-hand experiences and through the inner strengths that are governed by the heart.
  
  
• To gain an understanding of Beethoven , to get to know him and feel one's way into him with an increasingly passionate commitment, is another way of saying to develop the inner self by means of aspiring ever higher. Beethoven helps us to preserve our courage intact. His music epitomises man battling against the odds.
  
  
• Deeply moving emotional content and inconsolable melancholy are what characterise the works of Robert Schumann. In order to identify with the composer, whose life was scarred by suffering, the exponent must have a love for him and an affinity with the romantic era, which is often disparaged nowadays. But a cardinal principle in playing Schumann must always be to avoid sentimentality in the interpretation.

Willem van Hoogstraten, Elly Ney, their daughter Eleonore
and the granddaughters