Melomaniac as much or more than a man of letters, George Steiner has written over the course of half a century a great variety of texts about composers, musical genres and some pieces in particular, always with a sensitivity that allows him to go beyond the sound phenomenon. Never before assembled in a volume, these articles, reviews, program notes and lectures - and even an original essay with three voices that can be staged before an audience - are a testimony of their devotion to art that we access by ear but that it involves the whole body, the emotions, the mind. The experience of listening to recordings and not to the live artists, the painful letters of Beethoven, the ambiguous life of Shostakovich, the stardom of Liszt, the eccentricity and the finesse of Gould, the staging of some unusual operas, the ambition of Schönberg and the Greek myths associated with composition are some of the themes that allow the author to create harmonious disquisitions about music and politics, literature, psychology, history ... Steiner said in 1974: "In my private life, in my personal life , every time I have a greater need for music "; What better way to have faced that need than writing the pieces that we offer here to the reader.