What place has classical music in your life?

[Florestan]

Add the enjoyment of great literature, and you have the perfect quote.

Steve, you're a man after my own heart!

[Danny]

Its interesting that you say this (I assume jokingly) - Schumann was Nietzsche's favourite composer and his own compositions are very influenced by him. This was in his youth until he met Wagner, but of course he rejected Wagner in the end.

If not jokingly, then why did you think that?

But with regard to Robert Schumann, who took things seriously, and has been taken seriously from the first--he was the last that founded a school,--do we not now regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance, that this very Romanticism of Schumann's has been surmounted? Schumann, fleeing into the "Saxon Switzerland" of his soul, with a half Werther-like, half Jean-Paul-like nature (assuredly not like Beethoven! assuredly not like Byron!)--his MANFRED music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the extent of injustice; Schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally a PETTY taste (that is to say, a dangerous propensity--doubly dangerous among Germans--for quiet lyricism and intoxication of the feelings), going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, a noble weakling who revelled in nothing but anonymous joy and sorrow, from the beginning a sort of girl and NOLI ME TANGERE--this Schumann was already merely a GERMAN event in music, and no longer a European event, as Beethoven had been, as in a still greater degree Mozart had been; with Schumann German music was threatened with its greatest danger, that of LOSING THE VOICE FOR THE SOUL OF EUROPE and sinking into a merely national affair.

[Guido]

Fascinating. In his youth (or at least well before BGE) there are many letters that he wrote extollimg the virtues of Schumann's work - truly reverential words. But Nietzsche is not known for his consistency!

[Danny]

Fascinating. In his youth (or at least well before BGE) there are many letters that he wrote extollimg the virtues of Schumann's work - truly reverential words. But Nietzsche is not known for his consistency!

True, true!

But when you suffer from syphilis for most of your adult life, I doubt that consistency can really be had. 

[karlhenning]

Fascinating. In his youth (or at least well before BGE) there are many letters that he wrote extollimg the virtues of Schumann's work - truly reverential words. But Nietzsche is not known for his consistency!

There were times when he was known for his consistency.

Then, there were the other times . . . .

[Steve]

Fascinating. In his youth (or at least well before BGE) there are many letters that he wrote extollimg the virtues of Schumann's work - truly reverential words. But Nietzsche is not known for his consistency!

Perhaps Schumann wronged him in some way? Perhaps he was in love with fair Clara?

[Novi]

However when I'm in need of a soporific or an emetic, I do not hesitate to turn to the music of J.S. Bach or Mozart. They ALWAYS have the desired effect.

Ah, music, the universal panacea ...

[Harry]

May I all thank you, this was for me a most interesting thread, and I learned again a lot.

[gomro]

I am very much interested what place classical music has in your life?
Let me try to explain what it does in my life, so as to understand the question better!
A day without classical music is for me a lost day.
That gives me mental pain. I need to hear the notes every day, be it short, but it must be there!
Otherwise my day is incomplete, and takes the soul out of my life.
To take the music out of my life, is like taking my life!
So how is it with you folks?

Music is, to me, the greatest of all the arts, for more reasons than I have time or space to enumerate. And I'm finding, as the years go on, that classical music -- or rather art music, as very little of it is from the Classical period -- is becoming ever more of my musical diet, overtaking rock and jazz by quite a margin.