News at Eleven: For the quest section, the piano descends

a tentative, untrustworthy scale, like the onset of dream, while "The Masque"--the bit in Rosetta's apartment--is a scintillating piano solo, a real dance for dear life. [Leonard] Bernstein's daughter Jaime called it "ridiculously difficult . . . one of the hardest parts ever written", and it does magnificently what the poem can't do--spins the characters out beyond reason in their desire to blot out the dismal world.

from The Guardian: W.H. Auden's 'The Age of Anxiety'

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