I know this may seem unsophisticated but, also for about a year, I
listened repeatedly to the Rachmaninoff Second sonata in its original
version.  I also listened to the revised version but its sparer harmonies
were too dry for my uncultured Australian musical palate.  I think I
must have at least ten versions of the second sonata on CD and I have
two versions in sheet music although the Russian version of the setting
of the sonata looks suspiciously like the one edited by John Browning
(the latter with a relative absence of Cyrillics).

I can still listen to that sonata with great interest; there is something
new in it every time.  Has it made me a wiser human being?  Probably not
but it has changed me in some way; hard to tell how in a medical practice.

I can understand Don Satz's obsession with Kriesleriana.  The driving
beginning gets you in immediately and somehow the whole thing fits
together.  Another Schumann work that I have an obsession about is the
Symphonic Studies.  This is rather a secret vice since my former piano
teacher indicated, on several occasions, his disapproval of my liking
those studies.  It was a love that never could reveal its name; but now
I am revealing it.

I particularly like the way you can intersperse the posthumous studies
with the main studies and make a coherent whole.  Different performers
have interspersed them in different ways.  I have played them in public
myself twice.  I enjoyed playing them but I could see the audience at
the second performance was getting restless about 2/3 of the way through.
I left out the finale on that occasion since the audience was reaching
a lynch mob state.

So, for real obsessions with me I could not go past the Rachmaninoff
second piano sonata and the Schumann symphonic variations.

Ah, to reveal the extent of my lack of sophistication further, the
overture to Die Meistersinger: I have a Karajan version on CD of the
opera which seems to have disappeared for the present and a DVD performance
by somebody with Brendel as Hans Sachs.  I love every moment of that
opera.  If I feel depressed, as I sometimes do, Die Meistersinger makes
a good substitute for Avanza (not a Verdi opera although Zoloft Avanza
would make a good name for a Verdi hero).

I think the overture has a special fascination because, when I went to
see Die Meistersinger in Bayreuth, I missed the whole of the first act
since my wife and I, used to Australia's vast distances and assuming
that a little country like Germany could be traversed quickly in a Ford
Fiesta on the autobahnen, were still returning from Klaustal-Zellerfeldt
in the Harz Mountains as the Overture began.  Hence I missed that wonderful
experience of the overture in Wagner's own theatre (although the other
acts were great).

So those are the pinnacles of my musical obsessions.

Leon Le Leu
Australia