#post-romantic

When the septuagenarian Liszt was invited to Windsor Castle to play before his slightly younger contemporary, Queen Victoria, he launched into some of his compositions of recent vintage, of an austere, non-virtuosic style. The Queen demanded to hear the old works that had swept Europe off its feet 30-40 years earlier, but Liszt refused to oblige: "We don't play that kind of music anymore." Indeed, as I discuss in this blog, Liszt's late compositions have little in common with the works we still celebrate today, like the B minor Sonata and the Hungarian rhapsodies.

Here is a performance of Nuages gris (Gray clouds), a typical work from this period:

He told me that not one person is meant to provide true and complete; companionship, sexual fulfilment, economical stability, muse like inspiration, emotional support, child raising capability, or anything else that can be considered an attribute of honest love, tangible or not.

The idea that one soul mate can carry these romantic notions is false and backwards thinking, the value of folly in the belief in gods or goddesses.

Humans have for too long held each other to a ridiculous ideal.

Alf Hurum - Exotic Suite for violin and piano, Op 9 - III. Rektah