A problem child?
The latest issue of the New York Review of Books contains a book review by George Stauffer about Alban Berg with this bewildering sentence about Berg’s childhood:
He showed few signs of musical talent as a youth aside from informal piano lessons, reading through the scores of songs and operas, and playing four-hand arrangements of orchestral and chamber works with his sister, Smaragda.
Well, well… “Aside from”? If you had a child who could only read through lots of opera scores and play four-hand arrangements of symphonies, would you immediately get to the logical conclusion that he is devoid of musical talent?
(Sorry about poor Alban, he is the shame of our family, let’s just hope Smaragda won’t turn out to be such an abject musical failure.)
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