JOURNALIST: Herr Hübner, you are called the most successful classical composer of our times. There are 250 CDs with your music, and new ones are always added. Your repertoire ranges from absolute harmonical music to avant-garde music with a lot of dissonance. How do you see your success?

PETER HÜBNER: For me my success lies only in the fact that I was given more musical ideas by nature than I can realise externally. And I hope that the possibilities of realising these ideas that are at my disposal will continue to improve.

The fact that I am supposed to be the most successful classical composer of our time, doesn’t say much – because, as far as I know, I am the only one.

JOURNALIST: How am I to understand “the only one”?

PETER HÜBNER: Our great classical tone creators tried to gain an increasing insight into the laws of harmony of the microcosm of music – i.e. they were logically consistent in making the laws of harmony of creation the musicological foundation of their practical work.

Musical experts have not yet recognised that. The music critic thinks – embedded in his own narrow lack of musical understanding – that the great classical tone creators only composed just for fun, just as he would like to if he could.

But in reality it is different: what makes the great classical tone creators so different from all their insignificant colleagues, is their personal intuitive insight into the laws of harmony of the microcosm of music – a science which we could indeed call a “secret science”, because only few in our musical history have managed to gain this personal insight, and these are the greatest and they are called the greatest.

And the systematic development of this personal insight is recorded in compositional development as our musical history.

After Richard Wagner this process stopped for the time-being, because the intuitive insight into the laws of harmony of the microcosm of music had been personally lost among the tone creators, and the whole guild of those, compared to the classical role models untalented composers, only saved themselves with some seemingly new experiments – until this very day.

But after Richard Wagner, that harmonical research and development process had only been interrupted and not at all finalised. And that’s why – as far as I know – I am the only composer who still continues in the steps of the great classical tone creators.

From this point of view, the time of the avant-garde, 12-tone music and serial music is an episode which dominated just for half a century – similar to the reactor accident in Tschernobyl. ^Casals