More Musical Musings

I’ve been spending much of the day reading about Wagner, particularly this site. My gosh — I’m moved by an overwhelming desire to digest all 15 hours of the Ring Cycle at once, to know everything about it, to be intimately familiar with it. Sometimes I just want to absorb the entirety of a subject, just swallow it all down in huge thirsty gulps. I’m saddened, sometimes, that many people will live and die having listened to nothing but pop music and Top 40 crap — that most people will live and die without ever experiencing even just a part of the whole universe of timeless, wonderful music that’s out there.

I think of someone like Leonard Bernstein, one of my idols, a man who spent his entire life in the world of art music. I envy the lifetime of expert musical knowledge that he acquired. I imagine him as an old man, listening to something as complex as the Ring, or Tristan und Isolde, and knowing that music as deeply as he knew his own mother. I want to feel that way someday.

When Bernstein died in 1990, the New York Times ran his obituary at the top of the front page. It contained one of his more famous quotes:

I want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do justice to them all.

What an incredible man. RIP, Lenny.