Wolfgang Schreiber and I used to meet at important new music events from the early 1970s onward. He was writing reviews for newspapers and magazines in Vienna, where he spent the first seven years of his working life. In 1978, he joined the staff of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), a major German daily published in Munich, and that is where he spent the next twenty-four years. His articles have earned him prominence in German musical life and they carry weight up to this day. I have profited from his prestige: the sales of a book of mine rose after he praised it in the SZ.

It was therefore logical for me to approach Wolfgang Schreiber for a contribution to this book. He had intended to expand on his short text but never found the time to do so. No wonder: he writes and edits books, the most successful of which is titled Great Conductors.

May 29, 2015

To my mind, the phenomenon “taste” as prejudice or judgment has to do with philosophy, language, and the environment in which we live. One could engage in enjoyable and endless discussion about it all, for it is entirely rooted in the subjective.

I think the notion is difficult to grasp in an objective fashion, for its basis and premise are bound up with one's taste and individual background, and the structure of one's consciousness and ingrained reactions. Personal “taste” always plays a role in forming a judgment as a tacit or overt judgment- in-gestation, in most cases hidden or subcutaneous. Criticism, too, as any professional and institutionalized judgment, is very possibly always linked to a category like taste, but also with the capacity to think and to speak, as well as with knowledge, experience, intelligence, and so on.

I wonder if I have been able to help you …