This was a nonsense: it wasn’t true—it couldn’t be true—because you cannot lie in music. The Borodins could only play the fourth quartet in the way the composer intended. Music—good music, great music—had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something. What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves—the music of
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