The Tempest Sonata is not really a great work, Reger said, on close consideration it is merely one of the many so-called secondary works, basically a piece of kitsch. The quality of the piece consists more in the fact that it lends itself to discussion than in itself. Beethoven was absolutely the monotonous cramped artist as a man of violence, not necessarily what I esteem most highly. To analyse the Tempest Sonata has always amused me, it is the most doom-laden piece by Beethoven, through the Tempest Sonata Beethoven can be clearly presented, his nature, his genius, his kitsch all emerge clearly, and his limitations are shown up. But I only spoke about the Tempest Sonata because yesterday I wanted to elucidate the Art of the Fugue to you more extensively and more intensively, and for that it was necessary to draw on the Tempest Sonata, Reger said. Incidentally, I hate such labels as Tempest Sonata or Eroica or Unfinished or Surprise, such labels are distasteful to me. Like saying The Magus of the North, that is utterly distasteful to me, Reger said. Just because you have really no theoretical interest whatever in music you are the ideal victim for my discussions on music, Reger said. You listen attentively and do not contradict, he said, you leave me to talk, that is what I need, never mind what it is worth, it smoothes my path through this dreadful musical existence, believe me, one that in fact very rarely provides happiness. What I think is enervating, destructive, he said, on the other hand it has been enervating me for so long and destroying me for so long that I need no longer fear it. I thought you would be punctual and you are punctual, he said, I do not expect you to be anything but punctual, and punctuality, as you know, is what I appreciate above all else, wherever there are human beings there must be punctuality and, making common cause with punctuality, reliability, he said. Half-past eleven and you stepped into the room, he said, I looked at my watch and it was half-past eleven and just then you stood before me. I have no other person more useful than you, he said. Probably survival has been possible for me only thanks to you. I should not have said this, Reger said, to say this is a piece of impertinence, he said, of unparalleled impertinence, but I have said it, you are the person who enables me to go on existing, I really have no one else. And did you know that my wife was very fond of you? She never told you but she told me, more than once. You have a clear head, Reger said, that is the most precious thing in the world. You are a loner and you have preserved your lonerdom, go on preserving it as long as you live, Reger said. I slipped into art to get away from life, that is how I might put it. I sneaked off into art, he said. I waited for the most favourable moment and I used that most favourable moment and sneaked off, out of the world into art, into music, he said. As others might sneak off into painting or sculpture or into acting. These people who, like myself, basically really hate the world, sneak off from one moment to the next from the world they hate, and into art which is totally apart from that hated world. I sneaked off into music, he said, all very surreptitiously. Because I had the opportunity, whereas most people do not have that opportunity. You sneaked off into philosophy and authorship, Reger said, but you are neither a philosopher nor an author, that is what is simultaneously so interesting and so unfortunate about you and in you,because you are not really a philosopher and not really an author either, because for a philosopher you lack everything that is characteristic of a philosopher, and for an author similarly everything, even though you are exactly what I call the philosophical writer, your philosophy is no real philosophy and your writing is no real writing, he repeated. And a writer who does not publish anything is, basically, not really a writer. You probably suffer from publication phobia, Reger said, a publishing trauma has caused you not to want to publish. At the Ambassador yesterday you were wearing such a well-cut sheepskin coat which surely came from Poland, he suddenly said, and I said, yes, you are right, I was wearing a Polish sheepskin coat, as you know I have been to Poland a number of times, Poland is one of my two favourite countries, I love Poland and I love Portugal, I said, but Poland probably more than Portugal, and on my last visit to Cracow, but it must be eight or nine years since I was in Cracow, I bought that sheepskin coat, I specially travelled to the Russian frontier in order to buy it, because only on the Polish-Russian frontier do these sheepskin coats have that cut. Yes, Reger said, it is indeed a pleasure to see a well-dressed person now and again, a well-dressed good-looking person, especially when the weather is so gloomy and one's head more or less in gloom and one's mood altogether at rock-bottom. Occasionally you can now see well-dressed and good-looking people even in this down-atheel Vienna, for many years you saw in Vienna nothing hut people in tasteless clothes, those depressing mass-produced goods. Now a touch of colour seems to have come into clothes again, he said, but there are so few well-built people, you walk for hours through this down-at-heel Vienna and see nothing but depressing faces and tasteless clothes, as if only crippled people were passing you all the time. The lack of taste and the monotony of the Viennese depressed me for decades. I used to think that only in Germany were they so monotonous and lacking in taste, but the Viennese are just as monotonous and lacking in taste. Only quite recently has the picture changed, people are generally looking better, they are again wearing individual clothes, he said, when you are wearing that sheepskin coat you cut an impressive figure, Reger said. One sees so few well-dressed and intelligent people, he said. For many years I only walked through this down-at-heel Vienna with my head sunk between my shoulders because I could not bear to see so much mass ugliness in the streets, those masses of tasteless people walking towards one were simply unbearable. Those hundreds of thousands of the industrially clothed who stifled me during my very first steps in the streets, he said. And not only in the so-called proletarian districts, also in the so-called Inner City, the city centre, those grey industrially clothed human masses stifled me, especially in the Inner City, he said. Young people nowadays, though still tasteless, go out into the streets in very cheerful colours, as if all these people had only just, forty years after its conclusion, overcome the war, the war trauma, Reger said, which had made people appear so grey and insignificant for nearly forty years. But of course you see a well-dressed person only, as the phrase goes, once in a blue moon in this down-at-heel Vienna. That of course makes you feel good, he said, and then: Only Gould ever played the Tempest Sonata really well and made it tolerable, no one else. Anyone else made it intolerable to me. It is, of course, very ponderous, the Tempest Sonata, Reger said, like a lot of Beethoven's work. But even Mozart did not escape kitsch, especially in the operas there is so much kitsch, the coy and the frisky often turn somersaults in the most unbearable way in those superficial operas. A turtle-dove here, a turtle-dove there, a raised forefinger here, a raised forefinger there, Reger said, that