I can only listen properly to a musical work, especially the sonata op. 31 no.2, by imagining the subject who created it, that is, Beethoven, at the piano, playing it before me (with a vague awareness of the movements he's making with his muscles over the keyboard). I would listen even better to this sonata, which I'm listening to right now, if I could play it myself (even very badly). I've also listened to the Schubert quartet which I borrowed from you – it's so beautiful and so sad – but however sad Beethoven may be, he never has this abandonment, this indulgence in sadness, this Baudelairean taste for unhappy beauty which makes Schubert always a little sickly in the end (there are many musicians like this, whose beauty contains a little poison - Malher, Franck, Fauré, perhaps Wagner) . Beethoven is always positive – he breathes – he doesn't internalize – his tears fall outwards, he doesn't hold them back to mourn, deep inside his soul, the immortal coals.

Roland Dubillard
Letter to Maria Machado
Saturday 10th August 1968