Jottings: Slice of life - 14
Goldberg Variations.. It is one of those mysteries of life and art how great artists sometimes produce something completely unpremeditated and almost effortlessly to satisfy a trifling demand, to please an acquaintance or merely at the spur of the moment. And that frame of painting, book or piece of music becomes a masterpiece in the eyes of future generations. History is full of such works of genius. For instance, In between laborious symphonic compositions Beethoven found time to write a short piano piece for a young child of 13, which is now universally and fondly called "Fur Elise" , or a Leonardo da Vinci painting "virgin on the rocks", almost out of boredom - which now proudly hangs in the Louvre, and acknowledged by connoisseurs to be one of his most profound works of art, or an Edgar Allen Poe writing the "Raven" on a drunken night with nothing to eat, and published as an afterthought by his Editor, or a Johann Sebastian Bach composing his immo