Dear Nick, a) You shouldn't be embarrassed or apologetic if you don't bother to read this letter at all, because like almost everything else I do, this writing, like my loquaciousness in conversation telephone, should be construed as an exercise in vanity. b) Last evening I accepted an introduction to Beethoven's last three piano sonatas by listening to No. 32, Op. 111; played however not by Andras Schiff as had been suggested - the Internet denied me access to that recording because I had not become a member of the elect group for which it is reserved - but by Annie Fischer in an obviously old, technically imperfect audio-video recording which (in spite of or because of its imperfections) I found very stimulating. c) Opus 111 is obviously very complex music. I obtained a copy of the score. It remains to be seen to what extent, if at all, I will be able to follow it, but I believe there is correspondingly much to be learned. d) I hear music as translation into a transcendental realm of reality, specifically as a transformation of time, where a given note or chord, that is immediate and present, unmittelbar und gegenwärtig, fuses with the continuum of melody and becomes inseparably linked with an earlier beginning and a later end. In this manner, music solves the otherwise insoluble riddles of time, the contradictions and incompatibilities of present and past, and of present and future. e) When music inseparably fuses a present, an instant: "now", into a protracted harmonious melody, it reveals (and displays) a different and otherwise unimaginable dimension of time. f) The intensely punctuated stylized endings of Beethoven's compositions, both instrumental and vocal, serve as sound-frames, as fences, that separate the dedicated transcendental coherence of music from the mundane secular flacidity of silence and from the inchoate confusion of noise. g) This letter needs no answer. h) Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. i) EJM