The philosopher Barbara Bleisch encourages in her book "Midlife" to see the years between 35 and 65 not as a threat, but as an opportunity for reflection and realignment. Bleisch emphasizes that midlife is a time for both retrospective and prospective thinking, where one looks back as well as sets new goals for the future. Similarly, the 40-year-old Davos Festival repeatedly explores the balance between preserving its heritage and inspiring new impulses.

American composer Missy Mazzoli wrote her work Dark with Excessive Bright at the age of 38. Although the piece loosely draws on baroque idioms, it shifts between string techniques from several centuries and distorts a pattern of repeated chords beyond recognition. It effortlessly incorporates influences from baroque music to indie rock and ranges from simple beauty to chaos beyond all boundaries. Dark with Excessive Bright—a phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost—is a surreal and impressive description of God, penned by a man who is blind.

For the "Bavarian Pompeii," that is, bombed Munich, Richard Strauss composed his most interesting late work, Metamorphosen for 23 solo string players. Every single voice matters—and never returns in its original form.

The external impetus for composing Metamorphosen came to Strauss in August 1944 through Swiss conductor Paul Sacher, who commissioned a roughly half-hour string piece for the Collegium Musicum Zürich. It is a sonic play with subtle nuances—and a farewell from the composer to German culture: at the end, he quotes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica. Below that, Strauss wrote on the last page of the handwritten score: In memoriam!