Dear Alex, You wrote about Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony: "If you can speak of music in this way, this is mournful." You're in agreement with Tchaikovsky. He himself labeled the last movement "adagio lamentoso". You might want to look at and listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvoQLKgssYk where Leonard Bernstein interprets this music not only with his baton, but with his facial expression and with his "body language". The topics of mourning, mournfulness and lamentation have some personal significance to me, because I spent my childhood and adolescence as an appalling sour-puss. Witness the attached passport photo when I was 8 years old. When we arrived in Virginia, 80 years ago this October, the Superintendent of the Mission, an ineffectual scion of upper NY State Germans, named (presumably after the German Emperor) Frederick William Kirsch, was so appalled by my facial expression, that he thought it should be corrected by the nickname "Happy", and insistently addressed me as "Happy Meyer". You may not remember, - but I do -, how Mary Brewer would punctuate her GFS chorus rehearsals with public criticism of my facial expression, and most important, Margaret, when she was having trouble deciding how she felt about me, wrote to me that melancholy was a species of naughtiness. From a letter of January 6, 1950: "I am glad that Plato stated clearly to you the dangers of the intoxication of melancholy - which I have struggled vainly to express more than once. Perhaps I have not made as much of an effort to say this as I could have. There are several reasons, of which the most important is that I recognize the validity of that understanding of suffering which is so linked with its perversion - melancholy. I have been afraid that in trying to explain how wrong melancholy is that you would misunderstand me and suppose me to be preaching of philosophy of insensitive optimism." The reference to Plato and the definition of melancholy as a perversion of suffering have puzzled me for 69 years, but I have been too infatuated, ever to question it. In the context of my persisting senile euphoria, I have recenty had occasion to reflect on the exhibition of mournfulness and mourning in public life, in sculpture, painting and music. You may or may not have come across accounts of the professional mourner, Klageweib (German), la plañidera (Spanish), la pleureuse (French), la prefica (Italian), a woman who is hired to weep and wail for a decedent, on behalf of and to assuage the guilt of nominally responsible family members who when they think they should be weeping, discover they have dry eyes. I have recently memorized the poetry in which Hugo von Hofmannthal attempts to convey the despair of Ariadne when Theseus (whom her thread had guided out of the Cretan labyrinth where the Minotaur threatened to devour him) abandoned her on the desolate island Naxos; but every forceful description of grief turns into an expression of life. I suspect that genuine grief is a species of hibernation for the victim who has become incapable of thought or feeling. Correspondingly the monumental accounts of grief in Bach's Passions strike me as magnificent theater, such as the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion: Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder, und rufen dir im Grabe zu, ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh, of which the literal translation is, We sit down in tears, and call to you in the grave, rest gently, gently rest. My comment, if you're weeping, you can't sing, and if you can sing as forcefully as this, you surely can't be weeping very hard. Similarly, all representations of the Pieta, of the Crucifixion, of the "Descent from the Cross", and the Cross itself strike me as voyeuristic and make me correspondingly uncomfortable. My reaction to Tchaikovsky's "adagio lamentoso" is similar. Writing such music is not mourning, but its opposite. I have listened with interest to three technical analyses by the youthful Leonard Bernstein of the 6th Symphony. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVk0N-JfgVs https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL15366B33919FE68B I have also reflected on arguments in the wikipedia essay that the 6th symphony lamentation was either a) suicidal, or b) the expression of homosexual conflict. Bernstein counters objections to the effect that the fragmentation of melody precludes the 6th from being a symphony; Bernstein argues that inspite of its irregularities the 6th is a symphony. I think he complains too much, and that the questions raised have no objective answers, and give each one of us the opportunity of projecting his own intuition into this work of art. I am reminded of an anecdote of Nietzsche lapsing into (syphilitic) dementia, quoted as saying that the wanted to take it all back, and what he wanted to take back was the 9th symphony and all the other great and noble art. This is a theme which Thomas Mann introduced in his novel Dr. Faustus, where the protagonist Adrian Leverkühn, lapsing into dementia, similarly expresses the desire "to take it all back", to retrieve all that was great, and all that is being lost. I hear Tchaikovsky's Adagio Lamentoso as the concluding lamentation of the symphonic tradition that extends from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelsohn which is ending here and now with Tchaikovsky, the "taking back" of what is irremediately dying. Dear Alex, you don't have to answer any of this. It's 1:12 a.m., and I'm going to bed. You too, sleep well. Love, Jochen