The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

Judging by pictures on postcards, one would think that great musicians had been gods, not men. But now I learned that the world's greatest composers have been the most wretched outcasts of humanity. Schubert was considered by good-class people in Vienna nothing but an uneducated boy who did not even know anything about music; and he revenged himself, indeed, by composing a cheap tune like Ave Maria that even country people in the north know; and died of malnutrition at about the age of thirty. Beethoven did not even get a rudimentary petit-bourgeois education; he could only just use a pen, no better than a farm hand; and he wrote a ludicrous letter which is called his Testament. He fell in love with a few countesses, rather like an old hack falling for stud-mares. In the eyes of good-class people in Vienna he was first and foremost just a deaf eccentric, badly dressed and dirty, not fit for decent company. But these two outcasts stood high in society compared with some others of the world's greatest composers. Many of them were employed by comic-opera kings and were kept to play for them while they were feeding-including Johann Sebastian Bach, who, however, wasted even more years quarrelling with the bourgeois riffraff of Leipzig. Haydn, the world's greatest composer of his time, was frequently beaten by the Esterhazy family, for whom he was a workman for thirty years; he was not even allowed to eat at their table. Mozart, the man who most nearly reached the celestial heights, stood lower in the hierarchy of society than the lap-dogs of the petty kings and bishop-oafs who used him as a drudge. When he died of misery and wretchedness in the prime of life, not a living creature followed his coffin to the grave except for one mongrel; people made the excuse that it had been raining; some said they had had influenza.

By now I was asking for the dance of the fire-worshippers: wild men beating drums at night around a pyre out in the rain. and suddenly some instrument breaking into a four-note melody with a searing quality that went right through me; and a few days later, in the middle of my work, I would wake to a sudden sweet stab of longing for that wild, brief, blazing melody.