A few weeks ago | was being interviewed about my opera “Usher House”. How

CHAPTER 10: THREE PANTHEONS A few weeks ago | was being interviewed about my opera “Usher House”. How would I like to be remembered? With a straight face, I said | would like to be thought the best composer since Mahler, the best poet since Masefield, and the best economist since John Stuart Mill. The interviewer looked startled. Was she talking instead to the successor of Don Quixote, Emperor Norton and Walter Mitty? Probably. But not to worry. Fantasies are good things. They don’t become delusions until we start believing them. What I believe is that at least dozens of composers have the knack. There must be hundreds, considering the terrific film scores attributed to names new to me when | hang on for the credits. Each of us, very much including film composers, gives the world what we think it needs. We like to be appreciated, but we don’t give a fig what it wants. We won't always agree on what it needs. We'll defend to the death the other guy’s right to his message. But we prefer our own. That’s what my answer meant. We're each the best. But I do have the temerity to limit the list to those few dozens or hundreds. Someone might also be surprised at my choice of benchmarks in verse and economics. Masefield and Mill? A consensus might have picked T. S. Elliot, say, and Lord Keynes. Masefield and Mill are likelier to be remembered as old-fashioned fuddy-duddies already outmoded when they wrote. But that’s me. I am Don Quixote. Nota single idol in my pantheons in those three fields was born after 1900, although that could change in economics. My pantheon in music is Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Mahler. Mahler, the last-born, died in 1911 at 51. What about Mozart? Clearly colossal. Listen to the slow movements of almost any of his piano concertos. Childlike simplicity, then a slight surprise, then another, and all at once we are on a trip through the stars. But my top five show us more. Mozart is too darned enigmatic. He is too darned coy. He is too darned third-personal. And | like breaking a sweat. Mozart is uniquely the Chapter 10: Three Pantheons 2/10/16 1 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011123