About the site

Curriculum vitae

The Book

Books archive

First Drafts

Lola's diary

Free-writing

Links

contact Jeremy
contact Ellen

A visitor from Germany describes the music of Richard Strauss:

African and hot-blooded, crazy with life... restless, unbeautiful, passionate... he exorcises the wicked devils from our bodies and he does it with waltzes, which are the modern exorcism... capturing our senses in a sweet trance. Typically African is the way he conducts his dances; his own limbs no longer belong to him when the thunderstorm of the waltz is let loose; his fiddle-bow dances with his arms... the tempo animates his feet; the melody waves champagne-glasses in his face and the devil is abroad... A dangerous power has been given into the hands of this dark man; he may regard it as his good fortune that to music one may think all kinds of thoughts, that no censorship can have anything to do with waltzes, that music stimulates our emotions directly, and not through the channel of thought... Bacchantically the couples waltz... lust let loose. No God inhibits them.