My favourite passage in it though was one where Ben Zander said:
"…I once had a distraught young tenor ask to speak to me after class. He told me he’d lost his girlfriend and was in such despair that he was almost unable to function. I consoled him, but the teacher in me was secretly delighted. Now he would be able to fully express the heartrending passion of the song in Schubert’s Dir Winterreise about the loss of the beloved. That song had completely eluded him the previous week because up to then, the only object of affection he had ever lost was a pet goldfish."It reminded me of a music teacher who once told me that regardless of how much technical ability you have, you are unlikely to be able to play beautifully as a child because you would (hopefully) not have experienced pain.
