'Sweet Reason rules the morning...'

 Today is the actual centenary of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's birth – I jumped the gun on Sunday – so, to stay with the musical theme, here is a poem by Dick Davis, a kind of history of music in a day, with some very clever rhyming:

Listening

Sweet Reason rules the morning – what's as sweet as
Rosalyn Tureck playing Bach partitas?

Midday's for Haydn, who loved everyone
(Except the pompous pig Napoleon) – 
Music's Hippocrates ('First do no harm'), 
An Aufklärung of common sense and charm.

Mozart and Schubert own the afternoon –
High spirits and a Fiordiligi swoon;
A sudden key change: you will die alone.
The shadow that you stare at is your own.

Then comes the night. Pandora's lid is lifted,
Each scene implodes before it can be shifted –
Longing's a tenor's accurate bravura,
Sex and Despair are Fach and Tessitura;

And heaven's where the mind's sopranos sing
In harmonies undreamt of in The Ring.


Rosalyn Tureck was a pianist and harpsichordist who was described by William F. Buckley Jr as 'Bach's representative on Earth', and acknowledged by Glenn Gould as his 'only' influence. (Incidentally, fact fans, she was a classmate and friend of Saul Bellow at Tuley High School in Chicago.) 
Here she is playing Bach – the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV895. The sound quality isn't great, but the playing is...