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Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “If there were no music, life would be a mistake.” I could not agree more. For me, music is just as important as food, if not more so. Tolkien’s Galadriel concurs.
I like it when you look up someone you admire in Wikipedia, and the entry begins with “So and so is a so and so” not “was a so and so,” which is often the case. Let’s say I am so happy to find them still alive.
This is truer about Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer than just about anyone else, for his music lets me leave this planet while he is still here to create more.
As the liner notes from Ursula Schoch’s and Marcel Worms’s wonderful Pärt — Collected Works for Violin and Piano tell us: “Some composers become famous only after their death, others are already recognized while alive. Arvo Pärt, in contrast, belongs to another category; he is already a living legend.”
Yes, of course, I love Beethoven and have for most of my life. I admire Handel and Bach more than I can say, and I also love quirky Mozart and prolific Haydn.
I have a superb recording of Beethoven’s string quartets (Orford String Quartet), and I must have listened to them fifty times or more by now. The sweet familiarity of those…