The Oboe Concerto in D minor, S D935, is an early 18th-century concerto for oboe, strings and continuo attributed to the Venetian composer Alessandro Marcello. The earliest extant manuscript containing Johann Sebastian Bach's solo keyboard arrangement of the concerto, BWV 974, dates from around 1715. As a concerto for oboe, strings and continuo its oldest extant sources date from 1717: that year it was printed in Amsterdam, and a C minor variant of the concerto, S Z799, was written down.
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G. S. VIERECK – S. FREUD An Interview with Freud, 1927
SIGMUND FREUD has played an important part in the intellectual life of the world so long that, like Bernard Shaw, he has almost ceased to be a person. He is a cultural force to which we can assign a definite historical place in the evolution of civilization.
"I have been compared to Columbus, Darwin, Kepler, and I have been denounced as a paralytic,"
Freud himself remarks in a survey of the history of psychoanalysis. There are those, even today, who look upon him as a scientific adventurer. The future will hail him as the Columbus of the Unconscious. Columbus, seeking merely a new passage to Cathay, discovered a continent.
Freud, attempting to find a new method of mental therapeutics, discovered the submerged continent of man’s mind. Freud brings home to us the specific forces within ourselves which bind us to our own infantile past and to the past of the race. In the light of psychoanalysis we can understand for the first time the riddle of human nature. I have had the privilege of being Freud’s guest on several occasions. Each time he revealed to me new glimpses of his fascinating personality.
G.S.V.-1927.
"Seventy years have taught me to accept life with cheerful humility."
The speaker was Professor Sigmund Freud, the great Austrian explorer of the nether world of the soul. Like the tragic Greek hero, Oedipus, whose name is so intimately connected with the principal tenets of psychoanalysis, Freud boldly confronted the Sphinx.
"I am far more interested in this blossom," he said, "than in anything that may happen to me after I am dead."
"Then you are, after all, a profound pessimist?"
"I am not. I permit no philosophic reflection to spoil my enjoyment of the simple things of life."
"Would you like to come back in some form, to be reintegrated from the dust? Have you, in other words, no wish for immortality?"
"Frankly, no. If one recognizes the selfish motives which underlie all human conduct, one has not the slightest desire to return.
"Bernard Shaw claims that our years are too few. He thinks that man can lengthen the span of human life, if he so desires, by bringing his will-power to play upon the forces of evolution. Mankind, he thinks, can recover the longevity of the patriarchs."
"It is possible," Freud replied, "that death itself may not be a biological necessity. Perhaps we die because we want to die. Even as hate and love for the same person dwell in our bosom at the same time, so all life combines with the desire to maintain itself, an ambivalent desire for its own annihilation. Just as a stretched rubber band has the tendency to assume its original shape, so all living matter, consciously or unconsciously, craves to regain the complete and absolute inertia of inorganic existence. The death-wish and life-wish dwell side by side, within us. "Death is the mate of Love. Together they rule the world. This is the message of my book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
"In the beginning, psychoanalysis assumed that Love was all important. Today we know that Death is equally important. Biologically, every living being, no matter how intensely life burns within him, longs for Nirvana, longs for the cessation of ‘the fever called living,’ longs for Abraham’s bosom. The desire may be disguised by various circumlocutions. Nevertheless, the ultimate object of life is its own extinction"
"This," I exclaimed, "is the philosophy of self-destruction. It justifies self-slaughter. It should lead logically to the world suicide envisaged by Eduard von Hartmann."
"Mankind does not choose suicide, because the law of its being abhors the direct route to its goal. Life must complete its cycle of existence. In every normal being, the life-wish is strong enough to counterbalance the death-wish, albeit in the end the death-wish proves stronger. We may entertain the fanciful suggestion that Death comes to us by our own volition. It is possible that we could vanquish Death, except for his ally in our bosom. In that sense," Freud added with a smile, "we may be justified in saying that all Death is suicide in disguise."