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LoL - I looked on my secret bookshelf in my closet and I realized that I have some great musical books in there that not even *I* have read! "Musical Form and Analysis" by Spring, Hutcheson "The Development of Western Music" - A History by K. Marie Stolba "Orchestration" by Cecil Forsyth (only read fragments - quite funny!) "The Technique of Orchestration" - Sixth Edition by Kent Kennan, Donald Grantham "The Lives of the Great Composers" - Third Edition by Harold C. Schonberg "The Virtuoso Conductors" by Raymond Holden "Twentieth-Century Music" - A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America by Robert P. Morgan "Counterpoint" - Fourth Edition by Kent Kennan (haven't read yet) "Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life" - Selected Letters Edited and Newly Translated by Robert Spaethling (haven't read yet) "Music in the Galant Style" by Robert Gjerdingen (which I'm still in the middle of reading) And a bonus book that isn't a theory/history text: "The Music Lesson - A Spritual Search for Growth through Music" by Victor L. Wooten Enjoy! Peter

In one report I read, Beethoven is quoted as saying finally "And now my friends, the comedy ends". He had a dark sense of humour.

Beethoven died shaking his fist at thunder. Till the last moment of his life he was thus defiant, just like his music.

I nominate Arnold Schoenberg, who convinced himself into dying on a Friday the 13th, out of his own superstitions: The composer had triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), and according to friend Katia Mann, he feared he would die during a year that was a multiple of 13. He dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939 so much that a friend asked the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar to prepare Schoenberg's horoscope. Rudhyar did this and told Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal. But in 1950, on his seventy-sixth birthday, an astrologer wrote Schoenberg a note warning him that the year was a critical one: 7 + 6 = 13. This stunned and depressed the composer, for up to that point he had only been wary of multiples of 13 and never considered adding the digits of his age. He died on Friday, 13 July 1951, shortly before midnight. Schoenberg had stayed in bed all day, sick, anxious and depressed. His wife Gertrud reported in a telegram to her sister-in-law Ottilie the next day that Arnold died at 11:45 pm, 15 minutes before midnight. In a letter to Ottilie dated 4 August 1951, Gertrud explained, "About a quarter to twelve I looked at the clock and said to myself: another quarter of an hour and then the worst is over. Then the doctor called me. Arnold's throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat and that was the end".