Pablo Massa wrote in reply to me:

>Robert Peters:
>
>>And, yes, modern music cannot sound like Mendelssohn because we do live in
>>different, less harmonic, much more disturbing times.
>
>Are you sure? Ergo:  ...
>
>b) Mendelssohn's times were less problematic and disturbing than ours.
>Yeah.  Birds sang at the forests, beauty peasants dressed like Heidi
>offered themselves freely to soldiers and countrymen, and everybody drank
>beer all day because cell phones and PCs were not invented yet.  We were
>born at the wrong century, don't you think?

Absolutely.  And they didn't have Robin Williams either...  But seriously:
It is not that the world was better in Mendelssohn's time but that the
aesthetics of the time didn't allow to fully cover the whole dissonance of
the world.  That is why Beethoven and the Romantiker are the beginning of
modern art:  they begin to break the Klassiker spell of art used for just
elevating people.  They begin to express themselves and especially the
"night side" of their existence.

Robert Peters
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