03-12-2021, 10:34 PM
I'll get back to this soon. I want to put a solid recording of Brahms' string sextet Op. 18 as a young work of a composer of what would be four symphonic masterpieces. Brahms could get the richness of a full orchestra out of six stringed instruments, which may explain why he was slow to write a symphony for full orchestra. He got a full orchestra, or at least much of the effect, from far less than a symphony orchestra. Brahms was then about the same age as Mahler when the latter wrote his First Symphony, a work that on its own would have established him as a great master before age 25. See also Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman.... and much work by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.