"He introduced a very simple theme, nothing really, a fragment of a nonexistent melody, a figure of a bar and a half; he first let it ring out in the bass, with a power one would not have expected of him, and it sounded like a chorus of trombones, imperiously announcing some fundamental principle, an opening onto what was yet to come -and with no clear indication of what it really meant. But when he repeated and harmonized it high in the treble, in tone colors like frosted silver, its essence was revealed to be a simple resolution, a yearning, painful descent from one key to another -a short-winded, paltry invention, which gained its strange, mysterious, momentous quality from the pretentious, resolute solemnity of its definition and presentation..." -Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann, trans. Woods

"One should always be a little improbable." -Oscar Wilde