The stimulus of the festival extended beyond one’s own classes, and on one occasion I strayed into the wrong room by accident just as a contralto began her song.  It was the Lieder class, and the song was Brahms’s Mainacht […]

Brahms was a composer I hardly knew, except that on the piano at home there had always been a tattered copy of his four-handed Hungarian Dances, which – having been lifted to the heavens by Beethoven – I had tended to scorn as ‘light music’.  But this new out-pouring of romantic melody went straight to my heart: it was not the lofty music of the spheres, but talked of everyday earthly emotions in a warm, comforting way.  Listening to a gifted young singer, too, taught me at first hand that most music, whether for instruments or voices, is an apotheosis of speech.