Steve Schwartz responds to me: >>I never said that Liszt only consists of vanity. I just said that I >>think that vanity was the prominent feature in him, more prominent than >>in Brahms for example. > >You've met both men, of course. Oh yes, I deed. Two very interesting characters, the one a little bit too vain for my taste, the other one pretty jolly, humming Strauss waltzes all the time. They send their regards. >I'm sorry. You're simply telling me you like Brahms better than Liszt, >I would suspect because you prefer the music of one to the other. Your >preference is yours, but I still say that writing a bad piece of music >isn't necessarily a failure of character and more often a failure of >talent. I do not write about the quality of Liszt, I write about the lack of meaning in it and the vain virtuoso elements (the nadir of all this is Paganini). High-quality music can be pretty hollow. A lot of Hollywood soundtrack music is technically high-class but nevertheless hollow. >>Do you really think that Beethoven would have felt the need to so >>empathically express his desire for freedom (eg in Fidelio and the Ninth >>Symphony) without the experience of living in a deeply undemocratic >>society? > >There were lots of paeans to liberty in democratic societies at the >time. It was something in the air in both Europe and North America. The >difference is that none of them were written by composers of Beethoven's >caliber. In fact, there's a lot of celebratory talk in the US right now >about "liberty and freedom," much of it from the people doing their best >to limit it. Thus, talking about Beethoven's *motives* (he "felt the >need") seems to me a bit curious. I cant see it. If an American composer composes an Ode to Freedom right now it is because of his or her *motives*, that is that he or she lives in a society where freedom is limited. >>Like a Kafka without neuroses and a nicer father would >>have written pretty different stories. > >I've got a wonderful father, and I used to write Kafka-esque stuff, >mostly because I admired Kafka and wanted to see if I could make something >like that. I couldn't, but I doubt it was the accident of my particular >father. It was probably because I wasn't as good a writer. No, it was because it was just a kind of hobby - not an existential need like it was for Kafka. Robert