7 Pieces of Classical Music To Remind You Life Is Worth Living

Because poptastic chart-toppers don’t cut it when your mind is in tumult.

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Being a good middle-class public schoolboy, I learnt to “play” the piano and violin (the inverted commas are essential: I was no Wuja Wang, put it that way) and I dutifully screeched my way through Dido & Aeneas and other orchestral miscellanies for slightly bored parents gathered in concert halls across the city looking for evidence they were getting bang for their buck. We were all—children and parents—participating in a mass deception: we liked the idea of it more than the music itself.

Actually, what I liked most about orchestra practice was looking at a boy called Gavin. He “played” the viola and I spent a lot of those Monday evenings looking over at him, fuelled by teenage lust, admiring his outfits and his hair and his long bony fingers.

But I digress. It wasn’t until much later that I realised the actual purpose of classical music, its lofty ambition, and the tremendous solace it offers in times of crisis when the world and all the terrible people in it are way too much.

I discovered what all the fuss is about in the way many people do: when I was grieving. I had lost my aunt and, for the first time in my life, I found I couldn’t…