Campbell Vertesi

It's actually Four Serious Songs, and I don't think you necessarily have to wait 20 years to start exploring them. There's an often-repeated criticism that says the fourth ("for now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love") is somehow inconsistent with the first three, which are mostly about death. Personally--and I'm two years older than Brahms was when he composed them--I think that so-called inconsistency is the point: we live every minute with the knowledge of mortality, our own and that of those we care about, and the only thing that makes this knowledge bearable--just bearable--is that we have the possibility of love. I think it's the greatest song cycle in music, and I say that with "Winterreise" and "Lieder eines fahrendes Gesellen" et al. firmly in mind. Rudolf Serkin first performed Beethoven Op. 106 as a young man, put it aside for 15 or so years, went back to it, put it aside, went back in his 60's; he said only then did he really feel he understood the piece, but I suspect the decades leading up to it were an essential part of the process.