Integrity

The practice of music, in my experience, has a curious effect on character. It may be that, being the most spiritual of all the arts, to be exposed to it is close to being exposed to Spirit itself; but I have often been struck to what extent many musicians, people who live day in and day out with the most noble and beautiful and enlivening and even just plain fun of all the arts, indeed of any way to make a living, turn out to be miserable, odious, selfish, and especially expert at all the sins that make for immediate and lasting unhappiness. Not all of them, mind: some are great and noble people. But of the worst people I have ever known, many have been musicians. It is as though contact with this greatest of art must either raise or depress a man, as though moderate decency became impossible. After all, the greatest of them all, Beethoven, was enormous both in his virtues and his vices.

But I would rather speak of heroes than of cads. So let us speak of three musicians I know who can all be said to be integrity incarnate, who proved it by by resisting the greatest evil of their time, and who nevertheless were as different - in anything except greatness - as three men could very well be.

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