Goat Songs, which I wrote for Yoko Mitani, is the first proper use of the human voice in Western music for a century and a half, he said. There is nothing more ridiculous, Massimo, he said, than trying to set a text to music. Nobody understands the words and the composer is constrained to move from A to B and then from B to C and so on and so forth. That was well and good when the world itself was conceived as moving from Creation to Last Judgement, but it is not well and good if what you want is to enter right into the heart of the world of sound, not pass lightly over it. To set a text that has a meaning, Massimo, he said, is like walking down the road to reach the police station where you will turn yourself in. Nobody wants to walk down the road, he said. They want to dance in the park. They want to lie in the grass. But they have been brainwashed into believing that they want to walk down that road, and why? Because in the police station at the end of the road sits a man in uniform who will put handcuffs on your wrists and tell you what you have done wrong. My Goat Songs by contrast, he said, are designed to return the voice to the body. They do not walk to the police station in order to turn themselves in, and they do not make a virtue out of hissing and spitting and gurgling as these so-called avant-garde composers have learned to do, they have no sense of the sacredness of the body and as a consequence they cannot treat the production of sound inside the body with the reverence it deserves. We cannot write Gregorian chant, he said and we cannot write Buddhist chant, but we can learn from these chants what it is that needs doing with the voice, he said. I spoke to Yoko, he said, before she began to work on the songs. You have been out with friends, I said to her. You have eaten well. You have eaten too well. You begin to feel a bit funny. You begin to feel your stomach acting in an abnormal way. You listen to it. You are no longer aware of the conversation around you. And suddenly you know you have to run to the toilet. You run, you push open the door, you close it behind you, you bend over the bowl and suddenly it all comes out of you, all that you have eaten and more and more and more, everything is coming out of your mouth, and you don’t care what sounds you are making so long as you can empty your stomach. I said to her, that is the sound I want from you in the second song. And then I said to her: You have been out for the evening with friends. You climb the stairs to your flat. You insert the key in the lock. You open the door and you go in. You turn and you lock the door. And then, as you are going to put on the light, you become aware of someone, there, in the flat, in the dark, waiting for you. You turn. You see him. You begin to scream. That is what I want from you in the fourth song, I said to her. A scream of sheer terror, of sheer panic. Cut short. Then starting again. Then cut short. Then starting again. If you can do that, you can master that song, I said to her. And she did. She has performed my Goat Songs all over the world, and wherever she performs them someone in the audience faints, she is so used to it now that she is disappointed if nobody faints. I do not try to beat out the brains of the audience with noise, like some composers, he said. The secret is to be spare with the noise. Spare with everything you do. Each note is a world, Massimo, each sound a universe. I invented a language for Yoko, he said, a language that would allow her to sing as I envisaged her singing. It was such a relief, Massimo, he said, to write in that language, to put my French poetry and my Italian poetry behind me, to feel that it belonged in a different era, to a different person. It belonged to the era of politeness, the era of the waltz in Monte Carlo, of playing at being an artist in London and Vienna and Paris. When I came back from Nepal and shut myself up in the house here in Rome, he said, I knew that I had ceased to play. I knew that I did not have a long time and that there was so much to do, so much to accomplish. The capacity for chaos is always there, he said. If you do not come at things in the right way you will remain on the surface. But if you do not come at things in the right way there is also the possibility that everything will collapse. The Tantric masters knew what they were doing, Massimo, he said. They knew what they were up to. The principle of Tantra, Massimo, he said, is the principle of the retention of the semen. We must reach as close as we can to the sexual climax, he said, but not allow the accumulated tension to explode, as it does in normal sexual intercourse. It must be recycled, he said, so that we can allow the excitement to circulate, if need be for ever. It is a skill which takes many years to master, he said. Western music from Mozart to Mahler, he said, is nothing but delayed gratification ending in consummation and exhaustion. That is the music of adolescents, Massimo, he said. It is the music of adolescent masturbators. Our music has taken a different direction, he said, it has returned to its ancient roots. It has escaped from the puerile imitation of sexual congress, caress, arousal, delay, frenzy, extinction, which was the pattern of Romantic music and the reason for its enormous popularity among the repressed middle classes of Germany and Austria, who imagined that it was leading them up to an aesthetic heaven. Well, he said, they had their climax twice over, first in the First World War and then in the Second World War. That should have been enough for them. But not at all. Look at their books. Look at the music they flock to listen to in the concert halls, this so-called intellectual elite. Caress, arousal, delay, frenzy, extinction. All the same. No change. The basic lesson of history, Massimo, he said, is that no one ever learns the lessons of history. But because no one ever learns the lessons of history, they do not learn this lesson either. By the end he was very weak, sometimes he thought he had been talking to me but it had only been in his head, or his voice was so low that I could not make out what he was saying. As I told you yesterday, Massimo, he would say, and I did not have the heart to tell him he had said nothing the day before. He did not want to see anybody. His agent, Annibale Giacometti, rang every day. He has two great names, Mr Pavone said when I told him, but he himself is not great. In fact he is a dwarf. Spiritually he is a dwarf. His publisher, Herr Groeneboom, from Universal Editions, also rang every day. They do not want the hen that laid the golden eggs to die, he said when I told him. They are vultures, Massimo, vultures. When I am better, he said to me, I want you to drive me to San Felice for one last meal at the Circeo Park Hotel. My father was a naval officer, Massimo, he said, and I have a longing for the sea. He asked me to read to him the poetry of Montale. His early poetry made a great impression on me, he said. Later he wrote long and soppy poems about love like any other Italian, but his early poems are remarkable. He made me read many poems, ‘Ora sia il tuo passo’, ‘Gloria del disteso mezzogiorno’, ‘Portami il girasole’, and many more. Often he fell asleep as I was reading. He seemed to become very small. He said to me: I will not end my days in a hospital, Massimo, you must make sure that I die here in my house over the Forum. He did not want to see anybody. They will distract me, Massimo, he said, from this, the most important moment of my life. Life is not important, Massimo, he said. What you make of your life is important. And death is important. Just as the most important words in a book are the words of the title, which are written in bigger letters than the rest, so the most important part of life is death, and it is written in bigger letters than the rest of your life. I want to see no one, Massimo, he said. No one. My best hours have been passed alone, Massimo, he said, so why should I at this moment in my life start to see people? But at the funeral there were many people. So many people, sir, you have no idea. His uncle Alessandro, the bishop; his uncle Giacinto, the senator; his cousin Tarquinio, the banker; his cousin Florinda, the actress; his cousin Antonio, the professor; his cousin Giuseppe, the polar explorer; all their wives and their husbands and their children. Also friends and many composers. I do not give a damn for religion, Massimo, he said, but if they want to give me a full Christian burial, that is their right. While I am alive, he said, I belong to myself. When I am dead I will belong to them. I walked with Annamaria at the back. Some of the time I almost had to carry her, she was so frail and crying so much. The dear man, she kept saying, the dear man. Why she said that I do not know. He had often been harsh to her. Especially in the last years, when she could not see so well and she often left marks of dirt on the walls, on the tables. I must sack that woman, he said to me. She is driving me mad with her increasing sloppiness. I must find a good old people’s home for her and put her in it and bring in a younger, stronger woman, a woman who is not half-blind and does not dribble all the time, to look after me. But he never did. He said to me, I am tired, Massimo, tired. I have never been tired in my life, but now I am tired. Perhaps it is time to take a rest. Why are you crying, Massimo? he said, I have provided for you in my will. Do not fear. You are not so young yourself, he said, you probably want a bit of a rest yourself. I have provided for you and for Annamaria. You will burn all the shoes, he said, and all the suits and all the shirts and all the ties. Everything is to be burned, he said. I have provided enough for you not to be tempted to take this little thing or that. My family will deal with the rest, he said, and Federico will set up the Foundation, either here or elsewhere. It is of no importance but Federico is keen for it to be established. What do I care? he said. Let them do what they like. I have always done what I liked, why should they not do what they like when I am no longer there? We were visiting the Etruscan necropolis at Cerveteri, walking down the grassy tracks between the tombs. He walked very slowly, leaning on his stick, he would never lean on me. He said to me: Massimo, the most important thing in life is to know what you want to do and then to do it. From as far back as I can remember, he said, I have wanted to make music, so the first half of my life was a mixture of frustration, rage, excitement and depression, because I wanted to make music but I did not know what kind of music it was I wanted to make or how to make it. But when I came back from my trip with Tucci to Nepal, he said, all the anger and frustration had gone and I could sit down and work as I had been put into the world to work. Of course there were still moments of frustration, I will not say it was all plain sailing, there were whole days and even weeks or months when I could not see my way forward, he said, but sooner or later I found the way again. Sound is a creative force, Massimo, he said. Sound is immutable and sound itself is a creative force. My string quartets, he said, are the nearest thing to an account of my feelings I wished to give. Because the quartet has always been associated with inwardness, with feeling, he said. The directions of the Third Quartet are very explicit, he said. First: