Wagner and Beethoven and Ingvar Lidholm

Music is where silence comes to life and the present becomes almost perfect, like that which you'd always hoped for is actually happening.

After hearing Wagner that was it, there was nowhere for a composer to go. Everything had to be something else, until it had to be "new," as in the music of Ingvar Lidholm, which is "not music at all" according to the woman sitting next to me.

Beethoven still sounds so good, even though the sound is what we're accustomed to. Beethoven still plays with us as if we were toys, presenting a series of unresolved tensions in such a rapidly dramatic fashion that it can't help but feel like life, like the social and personal life of our time past and present, our own life that is.