Writer's Diary
5/23/27
I find that people literally don’t believe me when I say that I’m giving up running a theater soon. But that’s a sign that I need a break—that I’ve created the illusion of a machine that will run without operators.
We live in the future now; and we’re just realizing it.
In the last days of his life, Brahms was still studying Bach. “On the piano rack lay a large volume of the monumental Bach Gesellschaft edition, completed the previous year. The book was opened to a motet, the margins of the music covered with Brahms’s notations.”
I’m near the end of this 600-page biography of Brahms that I’ve been reading off and on for a few weeks.
I’m sympathetic to Brahms’s classicism, his work ethic, his curmudgeonliness, his impish eroticism. The most perfect classical composer, if not the greatest. His whole life, Brahms responded to and wrestled with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.
The late classicist is an early modern, an early contemporary. Pivot figures. Janus figures.
Brahms knew he was the end of Viennese music. He could feel it accumulating in him and discharging itself. After Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, the 20th century, the war, the end of the empire, psychoanalysis, in no particular order.
No art can happen outside the spirit of freedom. In truly liberal eras the spirit is public, joyful, playful. This is not our era. During illiberal eras—times of extreme surveillance and mimetic violence—the spirit has to be cultivated entirely inwardly, to protect itself from surveillance, hysteria, and moralism1
I can’t help but wonder if the period between 1890 and 1910 was the most wonderful to be alive.2
One interesting quirk is that liberals liked Brahms’s music, which was architecturally and sonically conservative, while conservatives preferred Wagner, which was sonically revolutionary. I wonder why that was, what that means.
The playing of today’s classical musicians—I’m thinking of a concert I saw at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center last week—is amazing. Because of the severity of training programs and the spread of classical music across the globe, especially in Asia, there are probably more great players alive today, by an order of magnitude, than ever before—and yet the atmosphere of classical music is so stuffy and geriatric. This kind of music should be played in churches and salons by candlelight amidst tobacco smoke. It’s really meant for worship and for dancing, for life.
Symphonies and opera are meant for the whole city to come talk about, essentially the modern version of the ancient Athenian theater festival—and yet so many great composers and so many great players and conductors merely serve to please rich people at galas and to assure institutions that they still have the right to exist. Or so it seems to my amateurish perspective.
If I were one of the several billionaires who is about to be created when SpaceX goes public, or when Anthropic or OpenAI goes public, I would build a castle somewhere in California or Texas and hire quartets and orchestras and composers.
Life today is unbelievably sad because nothing is real, or very little is real, and the real emerges and is culled and punished out of existence right away by online swarms.