Of another age

Music is perhaps best listened to rather than talked about, but I suppose what enchants me most about Chopin's music is precisely this quality of emotional purity that language cannot grasp and that words would only tarnish. The melodic curves waltz into view without presumption or presentiment, perfectly attuned to the volatility of the composer's emotions, switching with capriciousness between fragile, iridescent cadences, and the mad perpendicular rush of octaves, somehow bound together in a unity of form that is as immoderate and improbable as life itself. As Rubinstein observes, "All over the world men and women know his music. They love it. They are moved by it. Yet it is not 'Romantic music' in the Byronic sense. It does not tell stories or paint pictures. It is expressive and personal, but still a pure art. Even in this abstract atomic age, where emotion is not fashionable, Chopin endures. His music is the universal language of human communication."

The works of classical artists dominate our imaginations for the brief moments they are heard or read. Goethe's poems occasionally seem to linger far too long in our minds for comfort, like the consciousness of another age bridging history with the leap of a sentence. These works are timeless not only because genius transcends time, but because values are enduringly universal; they are the representations of a culture mankind has left behind in the sweep of history, but they are also the abiding echoes of an element of human nature that individuals have forfeited in the wake of progress. In Goethe's own words, "Everything nowadays is ultra; everything transcends, in thought and in deeds. No one knows himself anymore, no one understands the element in which he moves and acts, no one the material with which he is working. Young people get stirred up much too early, and then are carried away by the whirlpool of the times...thereby only to persist in mediocrity." We can do no worse than to allow the sentimentalism of another age to grace the quotidian existence of modern living.