I know that I can be harsh but the amount of sometimes really nasty private
mail I received from several honourable members of the list because I am
guilty of the crime to find Shaffer's Amadeus a good play is more than I
deserve.  But I confess that I maybe answered nasty myself, so it's tit for
tat.

But there is one thing mentioned in one of these posts I still keep
thinking about: the notion of a kind of inner circle of classical music.
The members of the inner circle are practising artists (and scholars?).
Uncomprehending people like Shaffer, don't belong to this circle and thus
talk nonsense about classical music and classical composers.  I think this
is a most dangerous idea because it makes us classical music lovers look
like a bunch of elitist people.

I studied literature and languages, teach German and English, write
reviews on plays for a German internet-newspaper, write poems and poetic
translations myself, do theatre workshops with teenagers, hold seminars at
the university in my hometown.  Does all this make me belong to the inner
circle of literature? Well, maybe I am a kind of "expert" which means that
I have more information about literature than other people who spent less
time with books and texts.  But I would never dream of saying that there is
an inner circle which excludes uncomprehending people.  Very often people
who are no "experts" have fantastic ideas and more love for literature than
people from the socalled inner circle.  And it is my desire to interest
people in literature, not to tell them: sorry, this club is only for
members.

So, who gives out the tickets for the inner circle of classical music?
Obviously an active playwright who did a lot of study work on Mozart
doesn't belong to it.  Do composers of musicals belong to it? Lloyd-Webber,
Irving Berlin, Cole Porter? Do critics belong to it? Maybe only critics
from Fanfare, not from Gramophone (or vice versa).  What about practising
artists who do classical music AND popular music? And what if people who
are not in the inner circle dare to talk about Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler,
dare to write plays about them using popular legends (knowing that these
are legends)? Shocking!  They have to be told that they are
uncomprehending, by the Central Committee of Classical Music.

In my eyes there is no such thing as an inner circle.  There are no
circles at all.  There is music and there are people.  Everyone is an
expert about his feelings and his love and his dislike towards classical
music.  The people with more information should humbly serve the people
with less information but should not play the gurus and popes of classical
music.  They harm the art form they pretend to love.

Robert