The Great Composer Quiz – Keeping up with the advance of technology.
This time, it’s a Quiz for those of us who still carry an iPhone 10. This Great Composer lived during the era when the telephone was invented. Because of his celebrity, he was once invited to participate in a long-distance call as a public demonstration of this astonishing new technology. Our Great Composer, who happened to be in Berlin at the time though he did live in the German capital, was escorted to a “telephone office” where he was to receive a long-distance call from a friend in Leipzig. (Hint: The friend was the leader of a string quartet which shared a name with a Nobel Prize-winning poet, a century later.) Our Great Composer was already highly sensitive by nature and when he was told the telephone call was coming from 120 miles away, he freaked out, could not deal with it and became agitated. He listened a moment to his friend’s voice on the other end of the line, which he could hardly hear over the pounding of his own heart, then, with his voice trembling, he said, “Dear friend! Please let me go. I feel so nervous.” He could not bring himself to speak further and had to put the telephone down. So, who was this technophobe, this Great Composer?