"Most people listen emotionally: everything is heard in terms of the categories of late Romanticism and of the commodities derived from it, which are already tailored to emotional listening. [...] This is why they love the expression of longing more than joy itself. The function, for instance of the standardized Slav melancholy in the musical consumption of the masses is incomparably greater than that of the greatest moments of fulfilment in Mozart or the young Beethoven. The leverage of music — what they call it's liberating aspect — is the opportunity to feel something, anything at all. But the content of the feeling is always that of privation. Music has come to resemble the mother who says, 'Come and have a good cry, my child'. In a sense it is a kind of psychoanalysis for the masses, but one which makes them, if anything, even more dependent than before."
