Hear.

“The musician wants to hear the silence,” Brendel notes:

She is there before and after the sound, tacitly breathing in the rests, at times, as in Schubert’s Sonata in B flat, the source of the beginning, elsewhere, as in Beethoven’s last three Sonatas, the designation to be reached: as the withdrawal into an inner world, the throwing off of all chains, the ultimate merging with silence.

Ever the performer, he wonders: “I hear myself. The public hears me. Do I hear the composer?”

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Brendel's lecture, "Does Classical Music Have To Be Entirely Serious?" ...