I haven’t composed anything in three years,” he laughed, “too lazy!” That was two years ago. Klaus Huber was 90, and knew full well that his oeuvre was complete. He took another Mozarella in Carozza and a sip of prosecco, and blinked in the north-German April sun—already anticipating, perhaps, the summer at his house in Panicale, with its view of Lake Trasimeno, where he and his wife Younghi Pagh-Paan would live and compose for a few months each year. I first visited them there. Huber had just been awarded the Ernst von Siemens music prize, the Nobel Prize of the music world. Huber, on crutches and supported by an assistant, continued to go to the piazza for an evening espresso, as familiar to the inhabitants of the small mountain town as to those in the new music world.
