Steve Schwartz replied to Joseph Sowa, in my view with complete sense:

>This is what's known as the law of the excluded middle.  I suggest that
>many composers write from both their heads *and* their hearts.  After all,
>there's an awful lot of stuff to keep straight when you're composing, much
>of it rather dull, but all of it important.

Was it Wagner himself who said that after the initial creative burst, the
working-out of 'Tristan and Isolde' was a coldly intellectual process? What
I do know is that Richard Strauss's motto as a conductor was 'the conductor
must stay cool - only the audience should get warm'.  Strauss on the podium
was in complete emotional control and made only the smallest of movements
- but his Tristan is supposed to have reduced people to quivering jellies.
Of Busoni, whose reading of the Hammerklavier sonata has apparently never
been equalled, it is said that his intellectual control was 'remorseless'.
And even the super-spontaneous Hofmann's flights of fancy took place within
the cold framework of absolute structural and technical control.  Indeed,
if all of these men had used a less 'calculating' and more 'emotionally
honest' approach, it's likely the final outcome would have had far less
impact.  It's one thing to feel something; it's another to clarify that
feeling and to project it to other people.

Felix Delbruck
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