Thanks for the link. I admire and respect Barenboim because he is a master craftsman. You hardly see him smile, but that's not because he is aloof - he isn't. There are few pianists out there who can "coax" the piano along. Barry Douglass is another one, as is Lisa de la Salle.

I look back and remember when all I had to turn to was classical music. It brought me through a lot of tough times, dealing with the pain. I frankly could not have survived without it.

When I was a little boy, I didn't speak until I was five. I was a sickly child, but as far as speaking, I didn't need to. I listened a lot. Anyway, I would go into these depressive fugues because [even though it wasn't known at the time] I was autistic. My father found a way to break me out of these fugues by playing classical music. When I was four, he played Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet and that was the first time I had ever heard it - and I was hooked. I couldn't get enough of it. There are certain pieces that take me back, and the two I mentioned in the post are but two of them. The Adagio from Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto is another, as is Debussy's Claire de Lune.

Until he divorced my mom when I was 8, we had this thing: he would come home from work every day, and after settling in and taking care of other family business, the two of us would lay on the floor and he had an old Hammond World Atlas he would open up. All the while in the background music was wafting from an old RCA Victrola phonograph - Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms and some others - and while the music was playing, we would travel around the world and he would take me to faraway places on the map. We traveled the world together, and I remember him telling me that the music was God's way of speaking to us.

I know it sounds corny as hell, but I have never had quite such a wonderful time since then, although I have come close. The stupidest thing I ever did was not pursue the piano, but in a way I am kind of glad because I am such a perfectionist that it would have killed me. So, I decided to re-create the perfect acoustic environment with a speaker setup in my home. At least once a week I will immerse myself in the wonderful world of classical music, and travel back in time to when my dad was alive. No one can hurt me there. Although I am not terribly religious, that is my way of speaking to God. Maybe there is someone out there who understands that. My wife does, but not too many others, and that is okay.

Sorry for the long post.