Which of these composers do you struggle with the most and why?

[some guy]

In the interest of truth, it must be said that Janacek wrote at least 11-12 hours of non-operatic music, maybe close to 13 hours or more.

Examples:
Decca 5CD set = 6 hours
supplementary orchestral = at least 2 hours
choral works, folk songs = at least 2 hours
supplementary piano works = 1/2 hour
supplementary vocal works, cantatas etc. = at least 1 hour

[some guy]

Verdi led a pretty bourgeois existence yet the depth of feelings and the intensity of passions in his music could not have come but from someone who experienced them.

You're not one of those "de Vere wrote Shakespeare's plays" types, are you?

Anyway, so many things seem to have gotten turned around somehow--you know, like music being a language instead of the much more sensible (and obvious) language being quite musical--and here's another one, I think. Feelings and passions being in the music instead of in the humans who listen to music. Oh, and the humans who make the music.

Of course, some music is quite remarkably good at eliciting emotions from those humans. The problem as I see it with focussing on emotions and on emotional content is that that is so often the chief reason for rejecting new music, "new" being a condition of unfamiliarity, at first, and hence not as good at elicitation as the more familiar stuff. Besides, humans are emotional creatures--you may have noticed it, yourself--and can make emotional responses to all sorts of things: clouds, kittens, romantic movies, advertisements, English landscape paintings, little kids with unusually large eyes, the list is extensive, and it includes music by Webern, Xenakis, Karkowski, and Sachiko M.

Here's a wee anecdote that I've retailed before, so apologies to those for whom it is old hat: When I hear Prokofiev's Eugene Onegin, there is one bit that seems impossibly melancholy to me. I can tear up just thinking about it. But what about Prokofiev's purpose, as expressed by the dramatic situation? Well, in the drama, it's where Onegin is singing about how inexpressibly jejune girls are, how bored he is with them.

This is a tune that Prokofiev used again, Eugene Onegin being a treasure trove of mineable music for him, in his comic opera The Betrothal in a Monastery, where the tune is now accompanying the words that it's a great privilege to serve a beautiful woman.

Two very different "meanings" for the same tune, neither of them even close to the almost despair that I feel from the music.

Indeed, I think the whole phenomenon of a composer recycling music in different contexts needs to be a part of any sensible discussion of meaning in music. But I think lots of things....