Over at Australia’s Quadrant, our cultured doctor attends a one-of-a-kind Haydn festival in his small English town and considers some of the latest nonsensical, politically correct leftist pieties.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope all of you enjoy this scintillating essay.

I suspect that this hostility derives from a subliminal awareness that the music is a reproach to their own way of living, to its ugliness. Ugliness there has always been, of course, but now there is ugliness without aspiration to anything else, and indeed a desire to destroy anything else. Ugliness, being within the reach of all, is both democratic and authentic, in a way that beauty is not.