Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

Adams contrasts three canonical composers as three different “scales” of expression. Beethoven is cast as intensely personal—music that feels like a direct transmission of an individual temperament and struggle. Mozart becomes the voice of shared humanity: poised, emotionally lucid, and broadly recognizable in its joys and sorrows. Bach, finally, is elevated to something impersonal and cosmic, suggesting music governed by deep structure—counterpoint and harmonic logic that can feel like natural law rather than autobiography. The line is less musicology than a witty metaphysical taxonomy, using composers as symbols for selfhood, species-level feeling, and the ordered vastness of reality.