[Maserati]

We love German music - what is the history of Western music without it? What would our musicians be without it?

The music of Germany is so very great and powerful, that it seems to be the ne plus ultra, not just in music, but even in all the arts (hence the development to Wagner). Relatively little of it is merely 'delightful', whether one speaks of Mozart or whoever - it stirs the depths far too strongly for such a word.

Yet what seems joyous, at any rate in general, in Bach and Haydn and Mozart, is utterly changed in Wagner and Strauss. This is part of the greater German tragedy of course. Then the real aesthetic horrors begin.

I have been trying to understand this colossal phenomenon for years, of Romanticism in German culture, of the good and bad in German music. Perhaps there are others in the forum who are interested, and may be able to help me in what I find to be a fascinating but very troubling history.

It means so much, yet we understand it so little.