During his last years, he increasingly used the marking morendo in his string quartets: ‘dying away’, ‘as if dying’. It was how he marked his own life too. Well, few lives ended fortissimo and in the major. And no one died at the right time. Mussorgsky, Pushkin, Lermontov – they had all died too soon. Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Gogol – they all should have died earlier; perhaps Beethoven as well. It was, of course, not just a problem for famous writers and composers, but for ordinary people too: the problem of living beyond your best span, beyond that point where life can no longer bring joy,
...more
