A sad thought

Phil Ford

Edward Elgar to Edward Speyer, quoted in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 560.

[When I was a boy] the world of music was opening & one learnt fresh great works every week -- Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Nothing in later life can be even a shadow of those “learning” days: now, when one knows all the music and all the mechanism of composition, the old mysterious glamour is gone and the feeling of entering -- shy, but welcomed -- into the world of the immortals & wandering in these vast woods . . . with their clear pasture spaces & sunlight (always there, though sometimes hidden), is a holy feeling & a sensation never to come again, unless our passage into the next world shall be a greater and fuller experience of the same warm, loving and growing trust -- this I doubt.

Comments

[Elaine Fine]

Sad, but lovely all the same.

[Mark]

Is this feeling of classical weariness the price of knowing "all the music and all the mechanism of composition"? Bliss is the student's curiosity. Today I overheard a student say, "I wish I had time to major in everything." For him, the world is still new, strange and fascinating. For me, sometimes it's just strange. With age, you get nostalgic for this desire of knowledge.