driven her musicality out of her. My parents were a frightful couple, he said, they secretly hated one another but were unable to separate. Possessions and money held them together, that is the truth. We had many beautiful, expensive paintings hanging on our walls, he said, but they never looked at them once in all those decades, we had many thousands of books on our shelves but they never read a single one of those books in all those decades, we had a Bösendorfer grand piano standing there but for decades no one had played it. If the lid of the piano had been welded shut they would not have noticed it for decades, he said. My parents had ears but they heard nothing, they had eyes but they saw nothing, they probably had hearts but they felt nothing. Amidst that chill I grew up, he said. I did not suffer any hardship, but even so I was in the depths of despair every single day, he said. My whole childhood was nothing but a period of despair. My parents did not love me and I did not love them. They never forgave me for having made me, all their lives they never forgave me for having made me. If there is a hell, and of course there is a hell, he said, then my childhood was that hell. Childhood probably always is hell, childhood is the hell, he said, no matter what kind of childhood, it is hell. People say they had a happy childhood, but it was hell all the same. People falsify everything, they also falsify the childhood they had. They say they had a happy childhood, and yet they lived through hell. The older people become the more readily they say they had a happy childhood when it cannot have been anything other than hell. Hell does not lie ahead, hell is behind us, he said, because hell is childhood. What it cost me to escape from that hell! he said yesterday. While my parents were alive it was hell for me. My parents blocked everything within me and about me, he said. In a ceaseless mechanism of suppression they nearly protected me to death, he said. My parents had to be dead for me to be able to live, when my parents died I revived. In the end it was actually music that vivified me, he said yesterday. But of course I did not wish, nor was I able, to be a creative or even a performing artist, at least not a creative or performing musical artist, but only a critical one. I am a critical artist, he said, I have been a critical artist all my life. Even in childhood I was a critical artist, he said, the circumstances of my childhood made me a critical artist in an entirely natural way. I certainly regard myself as an artist, that is as a critical artist, and as a critical artist I am of course also creative, that is obvious, hence a performing and creative critical artist, he said. What is more, a creative and performing critical artist of The Times, he said. I certainly regard my brief reports for The Times as works of art, and I think that as the author of these works of art I am always in one person and simultaneously a painter and a musician and a writer. That is my greatest delight: to know that as the author of these works of art for The Times I am a painter and a musician and a writer in one, that is my greatest delight. I am not therefore, as the painters are, only a painter, and I am not, as the musicians are, only a musician, and I am not, as the writers are, only a writer, you must understand that I am a painter and a musician and a writer all in one. That is what I perceive to be the greatest happiness, he said, to be an artist in all the arts and yet reside in one of them. It is possible, he said, that the critical artist is the one who practises his own art in all the arts and is aware of it, utterly and totally aware of it. This awareness makes me happy. To that extent I have been happy for over thirty years, he said, even though by nature I am an unhappy person. A thinking person is by nature an unhappy person, he said yesterday. But even that unhappy person can be happy, he said, time and again, in the truest meaning of the word and of the concept as a diversion. Childhood is the black hole into which one was thrust by one's parents and from which one must climb out unaided. Most people never succeed in getting out of that black hole which is their childhood, all their lives they are in that black hole, they cannot get out and they become embittered. That is why most people are embittered who fail to get out of the hole of their childhood. It certainly calls for a superhuman effort to get out of the hole of childhood. And unless we get out of that blackest of holes at an early stage we never get out of it at all, he said. My parents had to be dead for me to get out of that blackest hole of my childhood, he said, they had to be definitely dead, in fact for ever, you understand, for me to get out of the hole of my childhood. What my parents would have liked best was, immediately after my birth, to have locked me up in their safe along with their jewellery and their bonds, he said. I had embittered parents, he said, who suffered all their lives from their bitterness. In all the pictures I have of my parents, and whenever I look at them, I see their bitterness. There are practically no other children than children of embittered parents, that is why all parents look so embittered. All these faces are marked by bitterness and disappointment, you scarcely find any that are not, you may walk through Vienna for hours on end, for instance, and all you see in those faces is bitterness and disappointment, and things are no different out in the country, the country faces too are full of bitterness and disappointment. My parents made me, and when they saw what they had made they had a shock and would have preferred to unmake me. And as they could not put me in their safe they thrust me into that black hole of childhood, from which I could not emerge while they were alive. Parents invariably produce their children in an irresponsible manner, and when they see what they have produced they have a shock, that is why, whenever children are born, we see only shocked parents. To produce a child and, as the hypocritical phrase goes, bring it into the world is nothing other than bringing grave unhappiness into the world and it is this grave unhappiness that always shocks them anew. Nature has ever made fools of parents, he said, and out of these fools it produces unhappy children in dark holes of childhood. Without any embarrassment people say they have had a happy childhood, whereas in fact they had an unhappy one, from which they only escaped by a supreme effort, and for this reason they say they had a happy childhood, because they have escaped from the hell of childhood. To have escaped from one's childhood is nothing other than to have escaped from hell, and then people say they had a happy childhood in order to spare their progenitors, their parents, who should not be spared. To say that one has had a happy childhood in order to spare one's parents is nothing but a piece of sociopolitical villainy, he said. We spare our parents instead of charging them, lifelong, with the crime of procreation of humans, he said yesterday. For thirty-five years they oppressed me with any means possible, they tortured me with their frightful methods. I have no need to give my parents the slightest consideration, he said, they do not deserve the slightest consideration. They committed two crimes against me, two most serious crimes, he said, they procreated me and they oppressed me, they committed the crime of procreation against me and the crime of oppression. And they thrust me into the black hole of childhood with the greatest possible parental ruthlessness. As you are aware, I had a sister who died young, he said, who escaped our parents only by her premature death, she had been treated by our parents with the same ruthlessness, they oppressed me and my sister by their trauma of disappointment, my sister did not endure it for long and died suddenly on an April day, totally unexpectedly, in a way that is possible only with juveniles, she was nineteen, she died of a so-called sudden heart attack, you understand, while my mother on the first floor was getting everything ready for my father's birthday party, rushing this way and that to make quite sure no birthday mistake was made, with all kinds of plates and glasses and napkins and small cakes, nearly driving me and my sister out of our minds with her birthday-party preparations which she had been obsessed with from early in the morning, immediately after my father had left the house my mother began her (to us long familiar) birthday-party frenzy with all the hysteria imaginable, and while she was chasing me and my sister up and down the stairs and into the cellar and into the various outbuildings, in and out and back again, ceaselessly anxious not to make a mistake, chasing my sister and me around the entire house, hither and thither, with her birthday-party preparations, I was thinking all the time, I remember this quite clearly, is this now our father's fiftyeighth or is it the fifty-ninth birthday? all the time I ran around the house and around all the rooms thinking: is it the fiftyeighth or is it the fifty-ninth, or is it possibly the sixtieth? which in the end it was not, it was my father's fifty-ninth birthday, Reger said. I had been instructed to open all the windows and let in the fresh air, even then, in my childhood and youth, I hated a draught, but at the command of our mother I had to open all the windows at every other moment and to let in the air, he said, I therefore always had to do something I hated and I hated nothing more than letting fresh air into the house through all the windows, I hated nothing more than the