I have been asked to draw a ‘profile’ of Reinhard Strohm, to be performed as Ouverture to the opera in various acts composed by his friends, colleagues, students and admirers to celebrate the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. Much as I have tried to shape it otherwise, this Ouverture has unavoidably turned out to be the story of our friendship, simply because the strong bond that unites us lies in our common attitude that sees music as an integral part of the history of culture, of history tout court.

Our first encounter took place in the late summer of 1964 in Salzburg, during the Seventh Congress of the International Musicological Society; it was my first experience of a truly international gathering of musicologists, and I was strongly impressed by the dazzling variety of attitudes, personalities, methods and ideas all present on the same stage. During an interval, sitting on a lawn bathed in the afternoon sun, I started a conversation with a young student from Munich with blond curly hair, extremely polite and pleasant in manner, who happened to mention, listing them in a plain, matter-of-fact tone, the various flaws he had detected, while preparing a report for the Georgiades seminar on Ars Antiqua, in no less than Ludwig’s Repertorium. The conversation, if I remember correctly, took place in Italian, a language that Reinhard had already mastered, thanks not only to his frequent visits to Italy, but also and especially because of his open attitude towards other cultures. This particular aspect of Reinhard’s personality seems to me closely connected with, in fact derived from, the cultural and intellectual milieu in which he grew up, especially the milieu of his family: his father Hans, a gracious person and a fine classical scholar, was a specialist in Synesius. It was this environment that facilitated, in the best tradition of German education and culture, the development of Reinhard’s interests, especially his view of music as an integral part of our humanistic heritage: books like The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500 and Music in Late Medieval Bruges are the direct consequence of this outlook.