Orts #871

In honour of a Great Man and dear friend
who died on Saturday morning, April 28, 2018,
just four months shy of his 100th birthday


An African proverb says that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
With Eric's death the world has lost an extraordinarily capacious library


A mind stretched by a new idea does not shrink back to its original dimensions.
     — Oliver Wendell Holmes


Canadian composer Healey Willan (1880-1968) described himself as
"English by birth; Canadian by adoption; Irish by extraction; Scotch by absorption."


According to the French musicologist and critic Joseph d'Ortigue,
the French composer (of English descent) Georges Onslow (1784-1853) said

"The last quartets of Beethoven are mistakes, absurdities, the reveries of a sick genius . . . . I would burn everything I have composed if I someday wrote anything resembling such chaos."

- a sentiment with which Eric would have most heartily (and haughtily?) disagreed -

_________________________
 

 “If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.”
     -- Madeleine Albright, in her new book, Fascism: A Warning

see also Michelle Goldberg in the NYT April 13, 2018: https://nyti.ms/2GVm7Sx