Don’t Sneer at Truth, Beauty and Goodness — You Were Made for Such Things, by Matt D’Antuono

Professor, music historian and composer Robert Greenberg once received a letter from a musician urging him to give up the traditional and classical repertoire in favor of more modern music. The primary reason? To remain relevant to audiences today. In a course lecture on opera, Greenberg replies:

If we as a culture, as a civilization, cannot understand and appreciate and assimilate as our own the crystalline life-force and truth in the best art of our past, what does it say about us here today? Is Mozart’s extraordinary insight into the human condition irrelevant to us because it was a product of imperialistic Europe? Or are some of us today just culturally and intellectually unworthy of it?  …