Music Media Monthly

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona

Conductors, given their highly visible roles in symphony and opera come in two basic and opposing flavors: the humanists/persuaders (Koussevitsky, Bernstein, Mitropoulos) and the autocrats/high priests/maestros (Szell, Toscanini, Reiner). Riccardo Muti belongs in the first category. Reading Muti’s autobiography, it seems likely that two factors contributed to forming his temperate approach to music making. First, there is his southern Italian birth in the affable town of Molfetta, near Naples and below the Gargano Peninsula on the Adriatic. Second, as primarily an opera conductor, Muti has had to acquire (or, if the proclivity is natural, to tap into) those people skills that are necessary for effective collaboration with volatile opera singers. The result is a conductor of wide interests – a leader with a philosophical, positive outlook capable of inspiring his musicians to attain transformational levels of performance.

Muti has held important guest posts in Europe and in America. The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Italy’s oldest music festival, focusing on opera; the London’s Philharmonia Orchestra; the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; the New York Philharmonic, and the Salzburg Festival. Currently, Muti is the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony.

At age 70, Muti has had little in the way of high drama or conflict in his life, and his career path over 40 years shows a steady, upward trajectory to the highest conductorial perches. So is the book, then, simply a placid memoir, reflecting on the glories of an untroubled life and career? No. There’s much here to attract and hold the reader’s attention: reflections that impart the spirit of the man, with his ethical values, love for people and, surprisingly, his typically Italian brand of humor. While reading Muti’s book, I thought of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which reflect a stoic, self-effacing way of life. Here’s a prime example: according to Muti, “a maestro shouldn’t seek out the limelight, especially in the later part of his life. Once he’s had his career, he should withdraw from the media and try, as much as possible, to bring music to others so that he, ephemeral himself, doesn’t fall victim to the ephemeral nature of conducting.” Demonstrating his point, Muti has led concerts for prison inmates and at juvenile detention centers, conducted at Ground Zero for the families of 9/11 victims, and in Sarajevo at the conclusion of the Bosnian war.

A notable aspect of the book is its large selection of photos. Highlights include informal double portraits with England’s Queen Elizabeth II and with Pope John Paul II; Muti as child prodigy violinist; and Muti’s in triumphant performances at La Scala and in Vienna, Japan, Philadelphia and Chicago.

The afterword by Marco Grondona, a 43-page analysis of Muti’s conducting style, compares it to those of Schubert, Bellini and Verdi, among others, and makes for a rather extended postscript. Muti acolytes will love it, no doubt, as it pays tribute to the maestro, saying great things about Muti that the conductor, out of self-effacing humility, has not written. But because of this abrupt change in tone it makes for a strange and awkward stylistic volte-face.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words is recommended primarily for opera lovers, and will make a worthy addition to libraries with collections on conductors and opera.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona. Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8478-3724-3. 244 pages. Hardcover.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra

Jazz music and black-and-white art photography are quintessentially 20^th century art forms; both matured at the same time. By the early 1940s, the development of camera technology made hand-held field cameras like the press favorite Speed Graphic 4×5, along with relatively fast film, available for the first time to innovative photographers who loved jazz and were inspired to document the modern jazz scenes–mostly in midtown Manhattan’s jazz bistros, which featured legendary black musicians. The lasting legacy of these visual artists is a treasury of iconic musical imagery. The works of master photographers such as Herman Leonard, Gjon Mili, Allan Grant, William P. Gottlieb, William Claxton, Art Kane and others evokes glorious music from the 1930s through the 1960s that in many ways defines American culture in our mind’s eye and ear.

Benjamin Cawthra’s outstanding book Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz provides a window into the history of jazz and a perfect merging of jazz music and black-and-white art photography. It also illustrates both the gradual merging and eventual divergence of black and white cultures during the middle of the 20th century. As the author writes, “Over the thirty years from 1936-1965, the photography of jazz created a visual rhetoric that argued for racial inclusiveness in the 1930s, racial equality in the 1940s and 1950s, and black cultural nationalism in the 1960s… In making jazz visible, photographers visually equated blackness with jazz at important moments in the music’s stylistic development.”

Jazz lovers will appreciate and learn the backstory of the music as well, for Cawthra’s Blue Notes in Black and White is as much about the musicians themselves–Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and many other seminal artists–as it is about the iconic photographs of them.

My only complaint is that the book should have contained a high quality portfolio section in the form of plates to represent the legendary photographs in their full glory. Instead, we get relatively few of the photographs and most only in half-page sizes and low resolution. Blue Notes in Black and White should really have been a coffee table book, to do justice to the photographic art. It’s for this reason that I cannot recommend it to photographers and students of black-and-white photography, which is a shame. I do highly recommend the book to libraries with extensive jazz collections and to lovers of jazz.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra. University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-03875-3. 343 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

George Szell – A Life of Music, by Michael Charry.

Biographies of major 20^th century conductors appear to be proliferating these days. Within the past year I’ve reviewed three books on Leonard Bernstein, and one each on Arturo Toscanini and Dimitri Mitropoulos. This month, George Szell is in the dock, to be followed next month with a review of an autobiography by Riccardo Muti. It goes without saying that all these men were (are, in Muti’s case) venerable maestros who upheld the highest traditions of symphonic performance and brought the canonical classical masterworks to millions, as much by the sheer force of their podium personas and star power as by their uniquely legendary interpretations.

Former assistants or disciples wrote all but one of these books about “their” maestro, and so there is often an aura of veneration that the reader has to peel away to reveal an objective assessment of the conductor as man and artist. Not an easy thing to do in the case of these biographies, which becomes even more problematic for the reader, who, unlike the acolyte, was not the “fly on the wall,” able to see the real man concealed within the public legend.

In the case of George Szell (1897-1970), his accomplishment in molding the Cleveland Orchestra into perhaps America’s greatest orchestra, and certainly one of the world’s supreme ensembles will undoubtedly remain his utmost triumph, followed by his conquests as conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, his engagements with the New York Philharmonic, the NBC and Chicago Symphonies, the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Szell’s many recordings document his genius and will ensure that his great musical legacy survives.

That being said, those who have followed Szell’s illustrious career know that, due to his unfortunate personal qualities of willfulness, arrogance and vindictiveness, he created much ill will and disdain towards him personally: abusing his players, peremptorily firing them, stealing first chair players from other orchestras, and, in a notorious incident at the Metropolitan Opera, walking out on a performance of Tannhaüser in a fit of pique, angered by a mechanical breakdown in the change of scenery. Some years later, Szell, in an uncharacteristically introspective moment, averred, “I’m my own worst enemy.” Rudolf Bing, then the Met’s General Manager, who endured Szell’s insubordination, had the last word: “Not while I’m alive.”

Similar Szell anecdotes are legion among musicians. You won’t find more than a handful, though, in Michael Charry’s book. In assessing the podium tyrants Szell and Toscanini, one concludes that there is but one possible defense of their behavior: that their music making was of such a high order that it justified their dictatorial excesses (in other words, you had to take the [very] bad with the [very] good).

For the rest, which is a mostly dry chronicle of Szell’s triumphs and brilliance throughout his long career, Charry does an adequate job. What is missing is in-depth insight into the mind and persona of a great, but conflicted and possibly troubled mind. We never get to know who George Szell is – the person. The tone instead is respectful and objective. Perhaps a fearsome personality could only engender respect. Still, Szell, the anti-Mitropoulos, love him or hate him, did change the musical world, especially in the United States, by setting the highest possible standards of orchestral performance. For this, if little else, we should be grateful.

George Szell – A Life of Music, by Michael Charry. University of Illinois Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-252-03616-3. 412 pages. Hardcover.

Carnegie Hall Treasures, by Tim Page and Carnegie Hall.

This is a fun, fact-filled, coffee-table-sized tome for lovers of classical music lore and memorabilia. It’s a sort of “Antiques Roadshow” featuring facsimiles of autographed photographs of virtuoso musicians, concert programs, reminiscences, poster art, architectural sketches and much else to pore over. Readers interested in how this, the most illustrious concert hall in America (and perhaps the world), came to be built will learn the story of the coming to maturity of America’s corporate arts culture in fin de siècle New York. The chronicle begins with two chapters that define the importance of Carnegie Hall as a cultural icon: “A Concert Hall for the Ages” and “The People’s House,” its innovative construction (by an architect who had never built a concert hall,) and the landmark inaugural concerts conducted by Tchaikovsky in 1891.

The next chapter, “Celebrating the Composers,” documents the premiere of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila in 1892 and Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony the following year, along with premieres of major works of John Philip Sousa, Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss, and others, through the 20^th century to works of Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, and many others. This chapter, even more than the others, is filled with photographs, autographed musical manuscripts and other documentation, alongside fascinating musical commentary. As a composer, this was my favorite part. It’s through this particular panorama—as living history—that the book really comes alive.

There’s much more: chapters on the exceptional orchestras and maestros who have performed at Carnegie, and an album of great singers. Chapters on “All That Jazz,” “Pop and World Music,” “Rock and Folk Royalty” and “A Space for More Than Concerts” brings to conclusion this grand circumnavigation of Carnegie Hall’s unique and remarkable history.

“If you believe in ghosts, this would be the place to find them,” writes author/music critic Tim Page. Carnegie Hall Treasures is a wonderful book to leaf through, either in sequence or in random order, and I most highly recommended it to anyone and everyone. It’s a book worthy of its subject: a ‘treasure’ indeed. Carnegie Hall, which was saved by a group of concerned New Yorkers led by the great violinist and humanitarian Isaac Stern in 1960, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a New York City Landmark in 1967.

Carnegie Hall Treasures, by Tim Page and Carnegie Hall, 2011. HarperCollins ISBN 978-0-06-170367-6. 221 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

The Life of Schumann, by Michael Musgrave

Concert presenters and performers looking for a “hook” can perhaps be forgiven for latching on to famous composers’ birth (and death) anniversaries in programming canonical works. The celebratory appearance of a beloved past master’s music in mass quantities is a sure way to increase concert attendance, especially by listeners with conservative tastes. It’s not the same with books. Here, I admit I’m less cynical of the motives of authors of composer biographies. A re-awakened interest in the 200^th birth year anniversary of Beethoven in 1970, followed similarly by the Schumann and Chopin bicentennials last year, were the occasions for new and important research, resulting in valuable contributions to our understanding about their lives and music. The Life of Schumann, by Michael Musgrave, is a case in point.

Schumann is a composer about whom much is generally known, but not in any great depth. The general trajectory of his tragic and eventful life is familiar: his beginnings as an passionate artist equally in love with both literature and music; his failed attempt to become a virtuoso pianist; his meeting and falling in love with Clara, the daughter of his piano teacher, and his turn to composition thereafter; his founding of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik; the development and expansion of his compositional goals from solo piano to vocal to music for strings and the creation of symphonies, concerti, choral works and an opera; his close friendship with Mendelssohn and his professional dealings with  most of the musical giants in the milieu that centered around him, due to his growing influence as editor and music critic for the Neue Zeitschrift; his fostering and championing of the young Brahms, and, sadly, his gradual descent into madness, an attempted suicide and his terrifying confinement in an insane asylum for the last two years of his life.

Finally, there’s the conundrum of the visibility of Schumann’s music: the solo piano works have always been in print and are regularly performed, as has been the ever-popular Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54. Not so secure, however, have been the four symphonies – which were criticized for their heavily scored textures despite the inspired and beautiful music they contain. And there are the many choral and sacred works (including a Mass, Op. 147 and a Requiem, Op. 148), the opera Genoveva, and many other works in various genres that are rarely heard, even today. For a major and influential composer, Schumann is perhaps on a par with Berlioz in suffering semi-obscurity, for many of his late and highly original works remain unknown to the concertgoing public.

Author Michael Musgrave does an admirable job of filling in the detail of Schumann’s life, and much of it is revelatory and shocking. In an introductory chapter, he focuses on the youthful Schumann’s impending insanity, and its cause—syphilis, revealed only in 1971, with the publication of the composer’s notebooks, correspondence and diaries. The author writes: “… though Schumann did not manifest the clear symptoms of tertiary syphilis until the 1850s, his many ‘routine’ illnesses over the years were manifestations of the ‘latent’ secondary stage.” Symptoms of the disease had first appeared as early as 1831, and Schumann underwent periodic treatments from then on, hoping for a cure, which he thought he had obtained by 1840. Musgrave continues: “This explains why he subsequently married and had a large family: that Clara did not apparently contract the disease is not a challenge to this view: she could have been a carrier, but not infectious.”

Is it, then, an out-of-bounds stretch to infer that this may be why Brahms—by 1853 a member of the Schumann household—thought better of marrying Clara after Schumann’s death in 1856? Musgrave does not bring this up, but the idea insinuates itself: Brahms was above all a cautious and conservative man, and certainly would have known the root cause of Schumann’s horrible, terminal illness. Brahms researchers—what do you think?

Musgrave examines Schumann’s phobias and obsessions as a window through which to view his music, but does not conclude that these mental aberrations caused a decline in the composer’s creative powers:

There is no doubt that the traditional assumption of Schumann’s illness —whether one of incipient madness attached to creativity, or a progressive mental illness leading to attempted suicide—has influenced the evaluation of his music, especially his later music: and viewed the other way, that the often inward, even brooding character of some later music is evidence of a declining mind… if there is a certain fatigue, this is the result of physical strain and over-production, not of reduced mental capacity.

The Life of Schumann conveys with great sensitivity and insight the inner world of Robert, and also his relationship with his beloved Clara, as it charts the scope of his triumphs in Leipzig and Dresden, his ensuing disillusionment in Düsseldorf, and the despair to follow at the end of his life. Clara’s diary excerpts of Robert’s schizophrenia are heartbreaking to read; shortly after they were written he threw himself into the Rhine.

Today, 156 years after his passing, Schumann speaks to us with a voice we intuitively recognize—one of innocence merged with complexity, and triumph mingled with unnamable sorrow.

The Life of Schumann is part of Amadeus Press’ ‘Musical lives’ series. Most highly recommended for lovers of Schumann’s music, and for those interested in early-to-mid German Romantic music and the beginnings of 19^th century music/literary commentary, it deserves a place in library collections with comprehensive composer biographies, music histories and music criticism.

The Life of Schumann, by Michael Musgrave. Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-521-80248-2. 224 pages. Hardback.

– Steve Dankner

Bernstein’s Orchestral Music—an Owner’s Manual, by David Hurwitz

With the death of Leonard Bernstein in 1990, there came a flood of recordings of his compositions; of music recorded by him with the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and other orchestras; and, over time, a galaxy of books by authors scholarly, popular, and in-between. For all his well-documented doubts regarding his own musical legacy and the staying power of his “classical” music, it’s now abundantly clear that Bernstein—composer of “serious” and musical theatre scores, orchestral maestro, mentor (in the various roles of teacher, quasi-biblical sage and professor,) pianist, media icon and political/social conscience of the “radical chic” 1960s generation—has entered the pantheon of America’s greatest musicians, in the company of such greats as Gershwin, Ellington and Copland.

One can read a little or a lot about Bernstein, reflect upon the polished patina of his conductor/celebrity status, or get to know him more profoundly by tracing the personal journeys he took while coming to grips with the musical/philosophical/religious issues (and demons) that occupied and sometimes plagued his mind.

Where to begin? A good place is David Hurwitz’s Bernstein’s Orchestral Music—an Owner’s Manual. The 24-page introduction offers an excellent, concise primer on Bernstein, revealing the essence of who he was and the intractable and often conflicting forces that made him such a complex man. The dominant themes of Bernstein’s creative challenges and dilemmas emerge: “A Great Composer?”; “The Atonal Interruption”; in a nod to Schoenberg’s famous essay on Brahms, “Bernstein the Progressive”; “The Curse of Popularity”; The Jewish Legacy” and its corollary “The Crisis of Faith”; “Theatricality: ‘Joy’”—all are covered with delightful honesty and great insight. One can learn, in essence, all that is essential about Bernstein without ever having to crack a more “serious” tome.

After this excellent précis, the author describes Bernstein’s orchestral oeuvre in four substantive chapters titled “The Three Symphonies and Concertos”; “Overtures and Shorter Pieces”; “Vocal and Choral Music”; and “Ballets and Suites.” Overall, 20 concert pieces are described, with some reader-friendly musical analysis (there are, thankfully, no graphic charts or hieroglyphic figured bass excerpts to decipher). It’s all elegantly and concisely written.

Bernstein’s Orchestral Music is an excellent all-around introduction to Leonard Bernstein’s classical scores. Devotees of Bernstein’s Broadway shows and musical theatre works, with the exception of the Candide Overture and the Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story’ will have to explore other sources. To guide the listener through the works discussed, a 17-track, 77-minute compact disc of Bernstein’s excerpted orchestral music is enclosed–a nice addition to the package.

Bernstein’s Orchestral Music—an Owner’s Manual is part of Amadeus Press’ Unlocking the Masters series. Highly recommended for Bernstein aficionados in particular, it deserves a place in library collections with subject specialty areas on conductors, contemporary music/composers and orchestral music.

Bernstein’s Orchestral Music—an Owner’s Manual, by David Hurwitz. Amadeus Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-57467-193-3. 131 pages with compact disc. Softcover.

Devil Sent the Rain—Music and Writing in Desperate America, by Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza, one of today’s most perceptive cultural commentators, possesses a keen ear and eye for the dreams of the substrata of current American life. A resident of New Orleans since 1994, Piazza is a devotee of the city’s music scene and of rural Southern culture in all its diversity: jazz, Delta blues, country, bluegrass, folk, rockabilly and more. Piazza knows it all intimately, and he clearly loves all of it.

Devil Sent the Rain—Music and Writing in Desperate America is a compilation of essays and articles Piazza has written since 1994. In addition to interviews with great musicians such as Clarksdale, Mississippi’s Reverend Willie Morganfield, Nashville’s Jimmy Martin and rockabilly great Carl Perkins (composer of the song “Blue Suede Shoes”) there are wonderfully evocative riffs on bluesman Charlie Patton, four essays on Bob Dylan, and a piece each on pianist Jelly Roll Morton and “jump blues maestro” Joe Liggins.

In his essays, Piazza has a knack for getting to the essence of his subjects and making you feel as though you know these artists, even if you’ve never heard them sing or play a note. You’ll feel as if you’re in the room with Piazza as he interviews, for instance, Jimmy Martin–the self-proclaimed “King of Bluegrass.” This 1997 essay is a wild ride. (Piazza’s gift for capturing dialog flavored with regional accents has served him well in his recent writing for HBO’s hit drama series Treme.) In his Martin interview, which reads like a road movie, you’ll feel like you’re in the back seat of Martin’s lux black limo with cameras rolling as Piazza drives Martin, who’s a bit high after downing several 7 & 7’s, to the Grand Ole Opry for a performance.

To add to the mix, Piazza’s book offers perceptive commentary on post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans; his friendship with Norman Mailer; the BP oil spill; the current state of fiction and the contemporary novel; printed books vs. e-readers and blogs; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and–in my favorite essay—discovering rare 78 rpm records in a cardboard box at a rural Cajun flea market.

It’s great stuff, all of it—brilliant, engaging and authentic. Most highly recommended.

Devil Sent the Rain—Music and Writing in Desperate America, by Tom Piazza. Harper Perennial, 2011. ISBN 978-0-06-200822-0. 282 pages. Softcover.

– Steve Dankner

Arturo Toscanini—the NBC Years, by Mortimer H. Frank

Conductors—Maestros, as the conservative and elite musical world still anachronistically prefers to call them—are always in the spotlight, and during their often years-long tenure with their orchestra(s) are either able to remain welcome or sadly become unwelcome.  James Levine’s struggles with persistent illnesses made him a liability to the Metropolitan Opera and Boston Symphony, despite his great musical gifts. By contrast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic had great good fortune in nabbing the talented young superstar Gustavo Dudamel in 2008. Conductors, with their built-in star power, have a way (along with opera divas) of galvanizing the concertgoing public’s attention.

For some long-range perspective, my attention was drawn to books about two legendary conductors of the past – Arturo Toscanini and Dimitri Mitropoulos. They were Maestros (an eminent master or teacher) when the designation really meant something. Precisely because they were of successive past eras, I found reading about them and their vastly different musical legacies to be instructive, learning why they followed divergent paths of sustaining revered tradition or moving forward towards adventurous progressivism; these paths are still being followed today. Conductors come and go, but both Toscanini and Mitropoulos, it seems safe to say, will remain archetypes for the calling of conductor/music director as long as orchestral music is cared about, and greatness in conductorial leadership is required.

In comparing Toscanini with Mitropoulos, I was reminded that in ancient Egypt, the God-pharaoh was often represented holding the shepherd’s crook in his right hand, representing the ruler’s loving concern for his people, and the flail in his left, symbolizing stern punishment. These two “pharaohs” of music, Toscanini, with his stern visage and fearsome outbursts, wielded his conductor’s flail; Mitropoulos, a kindly, modest and generous soul, was the shepherd; his concern for his orchestra members and to musicians in need, to whom he gave away almost all of his earned income, was as important as the music he invited them to lovingly perform.

Arturo Toscanini—the NBC Years, by Mortimer H. Frank, focuses on the years 1937-1954. In 1937 Toscanini had just left his principal conductor post at the New York Philharmonic, where, from 1929-1936, he attracted an immense following. In his early years, Toscanini was known primarily as an opera conductor, with close personal ties to the elder Verdi and the young Puccini. Frank writes: “David Sarnoff, President of RCA, grasped the suitability of symphonic music to what was still called in 1936 ‘the miracle of broadcasting’… and embarked upon…organizing a new world-class symphony orchestra… created expressly for Toscanini.” Beginning with his New York Philharmonic tenure, and with the unprecedented NBC offer, Toscanini’s focus shifted to the symphonic repertory, and, as a result brought the mostly 19^th century canon of classical orchestral masterworks to the masses via the newly ubiquitous medium of radio.

Arturo Toscanini—the NBC Years is a book for the record (CD) collector, audiophile buff, music historian and Toscanini enthusiast and has a place in libraries with holdings on conductors and repertoire. The author documents all of Toscanini’s and guest conductors’ NBC broadcasts in sequence, listing repertoire performed (including critical and historical/biographical commentary on the music and composers represented), NBC orchestra personnel, and the programs and itineraries of all the NBC Orchestra tours and performances. For the audiophile, Frank documents the sources of the NBC “transcriptions” of all the broadcasts (all were recorded,) and itemizes the RCA Toscanini Collection of 82 compact discs, which cover a large selection of the conductor’s performances from 1920-1952, as well. The book also lists ten Toscanini videos from 1948-1952 that also would be of great interest to this book’s targeted readership. Recommended.

Arturo Toscanini—the NBC Years, by Mortimer H. Frank, Amadeus Press, 2002. ISBN 1-57467-069-7. 358 pages. Hardcover.

Priest of Music—the Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos, by William R. Trotter

Dimitri Mitropoulos viewed the performance of music as a sacred, spiritual act, and himself a “priest of music.” In his worldview, he sought to put himself in the subordinate role of communicant, bearing witness to the great truths of the music he conducted. In his youth he was torn between a career in music or becoming a monk. In this regard, author William Trotter writes of Mitropoulos’ spartan accommodations and demeanor, when the conductor was music director of the Minnesota Orchestra: “… The furnishings were spare: bookcases, a few chairs,  a studio bed, an upright piano… the bare essentials of kitchen ware – distinctly monklike. The black turtleneck sweaters… the tonsured appearance of his formidable head… the large crucifix he always wore next to his heart… all contributed to the popular notion that Dimitri Mitropoulos actually was a monk, or at least a practicing mystic.”

Then there was Mitropoulos’ fabulous memory. He memorized scores completely, never using a score in rehearsal or even in a recording session! Composer John Verrall bore witness to the conductor’s photographic memory: “He knew (my score) so exactly, he could turn to me and say things like ‘on page 27, how loudly do you want to play those three measures”?

Beloved by his Minnesota Orchestra players, he was abused by some of the hardboiled New York Philharmonic musicians who would talk back to him and throw music at him in open rehearsal. Mitropoulos shrugged it off, not wanting to show anger or play the aggrieved martinet. When confronted by bad reviews or by players’ bullying, he always turned the other cheek.

Priest of Music—the Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos is a truly lovingly written biography of this gentle genius. He was, really, the St. Francis or Albert Schweitzer of music, and not least of all, one of the great musical minds of the 20^th century. Most highly recommended for music lovers of all persuasions, and for libraries with collections in musical biography, conducting and 20^th century music.

Priest of Music—the Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos, by William R. Trotter, Amadeus Press, 1995. ISBN 0-931340-81-0. 495 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

Two wonderful and illuminating, though disturbing, books on the subject of the Holocaust and its impact during and after World War II are the focus of my reviews this month. Taken together, they expose the incalculable evils of Nazism and the resultant dislocation and torment of those European musicians who were prescient and fortunate enough to escape Hitler. So we have, with Eugene Drucker’s masterful novel The Savior, an insider’s view of hell, while in Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s A Windfall of Musicians we learn why the elite European classical musical culture was transplanted to America, en masse.

The Savior, by Eugene Drucker

Violinist Eugene Drucker, as most classical aficionados know, is a member of the world-renowned Emerson String Quartet. His novel The Savior is a powerful meditation on music in the face of barbarism, cruelty and despair. Musicians often speak of the ‘spirituality’ of great music. Here we have, in effect, music itself put on trial. Can Bach’s music offer at least palliative hope to those who have lost it, when performed for inmates in a forced labor camp? Is it an act of sadism even to try to offer such hope, knowing that it is illusory?

These are powerful themes, and in creating a tale in which, on its face, good is weaker than evil and is willfully perverted to inflict not hope, but the death of hope, Drucker has written a great book that rightly questions the morality of art and its place in a world in which life has descended to bare, pitiful existence and people’s lives are a daily nightmare, full of mental and physical torment beyond imagining.

The narrative is simple, though artfully told: Near the end of the Second World War, Gottfried Keller, a young German violinist deemed unfit for military service, is assigned to perform for wounded soldiers; soon he is transported to a death camp where the Kommandant orders him to play solo violin works for the starving, disease-ridden inmates, “to give them hope.” Bach’s “Chaconne,” from the Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 is the prescribed catalyst to provide spiritual salvation to these near-dead souls. The Kommandant’s motives seem inscrutable, and they are. The freakish dénouement is nothing less than horrifying. To flesh out the protagonist’s history, we are swept along with Keller’s own turbulent backstory–his relationships with a Jewish musician colleague and a Jewish lover–and his fear that these associations, if discovered, will brand him as a “Jew-lover” and will cause him to be executed.

The depiction of the inhumanity of that monstrous time and place will stay with me forever. The author has done a noble thing by recounting aspects of his father’s–violinist Ernst Drucker’s–life experience, which is an important source of the novel; Eugene Drucker takes the source beyond biography to make a universal statement.

The Savior deserves an honored place next to The Diary of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. To offer “congratulations” in a book review to Eugene Drucker is too puny a gesture; he has created a novel that will live.

The Savior, by Eugene Drucker, Simon and Schuster, 2007. ISBN 978-1-4165-4329-9. 204 pages. Paperback.

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigrés and Exiles in Southern California, by Dorothy Lamb Crawford

The self-expression and libertine attitudes of 1920s Weimar Republic-era Germany enjoyed by artists, composers, theatrical producers and others were swept away in 1933, with the assumption by Hitler of the German Chancellorship. The Third Reich soon instituted a period of artistic repression, leading inevitably, as Dorothy Crawford writes,

to the purging and eventual extermination of Jews, socialists, homosexuals and modernists (not only in Germany), as Hitler invaded or assumed control of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France and Hungary… Artists found their work banned or eliminated, their civil liberties denied, and their means of survival extinguished. An enormous exodus of highly trained musicians from Europe (to America) ensued.

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigrés and Exiles in Southern California tells the fascinating story of how and why these artists–particularly composers–sought refuge in the United States, and in Southern California in particular. The Hollywood sound film was the lure. The unwanted composers of mitteleuropa–political and artistic refugees–descended upon Hollywood in droves in hopes of earning a living composing for the “talkies.”

Hitler’s “gift” to America includes both innumerable famous and unknown composers and performers–and not all German nationals. This book focuses on the well known: such composers as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Kurt Weill; conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter; and performers such as pianist Artur Rubinstein, violinist Joseph Szigeti, and soprano Lotte Lehmann.

Most did not know what to expect, much less how to break into film, and were greatly disillusioned. Klemperer exclaimed, “My God, my God, I didn’t know that such a lack of intellectuality existed.” As author Campbell points out, these artists migrated to the wrong place; New York City or Boston would have possessed the recognizable culture they knew: mature orchestras, opera houses, chamber music societies et al. The fledgling arts organizations in Southern California had no full time opera, a part time Los Angeles Philharmonic with no permanent concert hall, little in the way of chamber music until after 1940, and so on.

Émigré composers Max Steiner (who arrived in America in 1914,) Erich Korngold and Franz Waxman found unqualified success; most of the others were only able to find hack work as unaccredited subs for credited composers.

A Windfall of Musicians… tells an important, and heretofore largely undocumented story of the arts in the mass-market culture of the early-to-mid-20^th century under the influence of both National Socialism and star-struck Hollywood. As such, it is a perfect counterweight to Eugene Drucker’s personal account of the tormented violinist antihero in The Savior. Director/playwright Gottfied Reinhardt, himself an émigré, sums up the story of the exodus of artists from Europe perfectly: “It was a mass migration of a thrown-together elite unprecedented in history.” Most highly recommended.

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s émigrés and Exiles in Southern California, by Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Yale University Press; 2009. ISBN 978-0-300-171238-5. 318 pages. Softcover.

– Steve Dankner

Death and the Maiden, by Gerald Elias

Whether or not Gerald Elias has invented the genre of musical detective/murder mystery novel, he has certainly put his stamp upon it, with three books in rapid succession. All center around the protagonist Daniel Jacobus – a blind, crusty old-school violinist, jaded pedagogue and amateur sleuth who has a knack for becoming involved with the shady, subterranean and ego-driven personalities who populate the dark side of classical music. Here, we have a studly missing violinist; a quasi-demonic “true believer” in the mystic powers of classical music; an unscrupulous dealer in rare violins; and the main characters: three of the four members of the New Magini String Quartet – a formerly stellar ensemble on the verge of collapse, due to its unaccounted-for and presumed dead first violinist, lost in Peru, of all places. The New Magini has thus become a quartet that is rife with bitterness and hatred; so much so that one member has devised a murderous plot to eliminate the other three. Who is it and why? Read the book.

For comic relief, Elias diverts us with the pidgin English of a Peruvian police chief and the slobbering affections – new to this installment – of Trotsky, the bulldog. And Jacobus himself, compared to his two previous incarnations, is more than usually prone to Henny Youngman-style one-liners and spoonerisms. What fun!

In plotting Death and the Maiden, Elias taps into the real-life account of the demise of the Audubon String Quartet – “the saddest case of inflamed passion” among many examples of the negative, bitter and divisive interpersonal relationships that are an occupational hazard for string quartets: four people rehearsing, arguing and touring for up to six hours each day, month after month, year after year; it happens. The inside story of the Audubon’s self-destruction, personal lawsuits and monetary losses is embellished by Elias to go way beyond the legal troubles and animosity experienced by the Audubon, and here extends to grisly dismemberment and murder. All this makes for highly unlikely material within the supposedly staid and highbrow world of classical music. If you’re a classical maven used only to the Olympian heights of idealized classical music, you’ll have to suspend disbelief to imagine that groups such as the New Magini can sink to this level of depravity. Call it a cloak and dagger musical melodrama, with Carnegie Hall as the backdrop.

The author, in an acknowledgement, writes, “One great thing about writing within your own field of expertise is that you don’t have to do a lot of research.” True enough: Elias, a concert violinist, writes with the ultimate practitioner’s/insider’s proficiency; many passages exhibit deep musical knowledge: his descriptions of how players in a string quartet shape phrases, articulate passages, etc. add immeasurably to the story, and enable the reader to feel like the proverbial “fly on the wall” at an intense rehearsal of a great piece of music.

Death and the Maiden is a great read and a worthy successor to Elias’ two previous Jacobus whodunits, Devil’s Trill and Dance Macabre. I’m already looking forward to his next book in the series. Most highly recommended.

Death and the Maiden, by Gerald Elias, Minotaur Books – an imprint of St. Martin’s Press; August, 2011. ISBN 978-0-312-67834-0. 291 pages. Hardcover.

My Nine Lives; a memoir of Many Careers in Music, by Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette

The “nine lives” that renowned pianist, Peabody Conservatory instructor, conductor, and Tanglewood administrator Leon Fleisher recounts in his memoir-cum-autobiography follow an unpredictable, zigzag trajectory. Fleisher, a child prodigy, began studying piano at age four, gave his first recital at seven, and became a private student of the great Austrian pianist/composer Artur Schnabel at nine, beginning a remarkable ten-year mentorship. Fleisher was on track to fulfill a history-making destiny.

The pianist later became a protégé of conductor George Szell, the fearsome director of the Cleveland Orchestra when Fleisher first performed with him in 1954. This triumvirate, Schnabel, Szell and Fleisher, formed the artistic sensibility that has sustained the 83-year-old pianist throughout his long life.

The cathartic section of My Nine Lives traverses a period of 33 years, from age 36-69, when the fear and agony of a career interrupted by a crippling of the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand forced Fleisher into semi-retirement from the concert stage. Fleisher recounts his frustration with incompetent quacks and well-meaning physicians and surgeons who hadn’t a clue about his disability or how to cure it. Eventually, a series of progressive Botox injection therapies provided a semi-cure, but always with the specter of a reccurrence, which was finally diagnosed as focal dystonia. In those years, Fleisher specialized in mastering the limited left hand solo and orchestral repertoire, and made a partial comeback by extensively performing Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

The personal side of Fleisher’s life – his three marriages, the loss of his administrative and teaching positions at Tanglewood when Seiji Ozawa peremptorily dismissed him in 1996, his depression over his hand affliction that made him contemplate suicide, and his triumphant return to the concert stage as a two-handed pianist after the Botox therapy succeeded are told candidly, and with confessional honesty.

The book is a remarkable testament, and is highly recommended for all classical music lovers. Triumph over adversity (or fate, if you want a Beethovenian take,) could well have served as perhaps a truer subtitle.

My Nine Lives; a memoir of Many Careers in Music, by Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette, Doubleday; 2010. ISBN 978-0-385-52918-1. 325 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

Liszt as Transcriber, by Jonathan Kregor

Ravel Studies, edited by Deborah Mawer

Two recent books on Franz Liszt and Maurice Ravel–composers with vastly different personas but who both shared a love for compositional and performer virtuosity, and who often musically expressed the “dark side” of human nature–are the subjects of fascinating books this month, both published by Cambridge University Press.

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)–as virtuoso pianist and pedagogue, transcriber of both old and new music, composer and musical/philosophical progressive–cast a giant shadow over the 19^th century. In his most visible role as a concert pianist, Liszt transformed all he touched, taking music, and the attendant functions music served, to new levels of awareness, changing it forever in the minds of all who heard him perform. It was perhaps most especially his astounding transcriptions, which he made over a period of some 50 years, that left the greatest influence on his contemporaries; the author of the present book tells us that “roughly half of (Liszt’s) vast output relies on the music of other composers.”

In Liszt’s relatively long life, Kreger writes, he “met Beethoven and Claude Debussy (and) attended the premieres of (Berlioz’s) Symphony fantastique and (Wagner’s) Parsifal.” Think of the diversity of styles and the worlds of sound music traversed during those years, from Classicism to budding Impressionism. Liszt absorbed and channeled this panoply into his transcendent transcriptions – many of them expanded versions or re-imaginings of the source composers’ works. This is the boundary Liszt crossed: where an “arrangement” (usually a faithful note-by-note transferral to the keyboard of a non-piano source work) becomes, at an evolved level, a “transcription,” or as Liszt preferred to call his opera transcriptions, “paraphrases.” Transcriptions, in Liszt’s hands and in his imagination, thus become embellished works, sometimes notated in three or four staves, showcasing the expanded and more virtuosic parts for the superior pianist. Liszt took advantage of the increasingly sophisticated technology of piano manufacture during the early- to mid-19^th century and redefined the instrument through these works, with the piano becoming, in effect, a one-person orchestra.

Liszt as Transcriber is abundantly illustrated with musical examples of Liszt’s and others’ works, with excerpts of arrangements and transcriptions of works including Mozart‘s Requiem, several Beethoven symphonies, Schubert’s lieder, overtures by C.M v. Weber and Rossini, Wagner’s Tannhaüser and Tristan und Isolde, and Verdi‘s Requiem.

Given Liszt’s importance and lasting influence, this beautifully produced, excellently written and documented book will likely prove to be a useful–even necessary–addition to the personal libraries of pianists, students of the piano literature and researchers in the field of 19^th century music/Romanticism, and to institutional music libraries with collections in these areas. Highly recommended.

Liszt as Transcriber, by Jonathan Kregor, Cambridge University Press 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-11777-7. 299 pages, hardcover.

Ravel Studies, edited by Deborah Mawer, is a compendium of nine scholarly chapters about Maurice Ravel (1874-1937). The goal of the book is “through historical, critical, and analytical means,” to “reveal the symbiotic relationships between Ravel’s music and aesthetic, cultural, literary, gender, performance-based, and medical studies.”

The chapter titles are intriguing and may well prompt the reader to investigate further the obscure extra-musical pursuits of this revered French master, whose music has always been beloved by performers and audiences. Chapter titles such as “Erotic ambiguity in Ravel’s music,” “Enchantments and illusions: recasting the creation of L’Enfant et les sortilèges” and “Encountering La Valse: perspectives and pitfalls” suggest that there are hidden and unplumbed depths within Ravel’s music and psyche. The chapters are indeed illuminating – perhaps none more so than the final one, which recounts the backstory behind the composer’s tragic and still-mystifying death, “The longstanding fascination with ‘le cas Ravel.”

It does appear that Ravel was characterized by a certain shyness, reticence or disengagement that seemed at odds with the outward-looking effervescence, brilliance, virtuosity and child-like qualities of his most popular successes, such as Bolero, Piano Concerto in G and Ma mère l’oye. Yet a “dark side” to his personality is hinted at by works such as Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, La Valse, Valses nobles et sentimentales and Chansons madécasses. These suggest an underlying malaise beneath the stylish veneer of a dandy-ish, cosmopolitan, world-famous composer. As he grew older, and despite the early and easily achieved perfection of his neoclassical works, Ravel’s music began to reveal a pentimento of dark and latent tragedy – even morbid despair, as evidenced in the finale of his String Quartet in F, composed in 1903; it was subliminally there from the beginning.

Ravel loved jazz and had an abiding, mutually shared affection for his American confrere George Gershwin, whose Concerto in F, composed in 1925, provided the Frenchman with a model for his own two piano concertos of 1930/31. Editor Deborah Mawer’s “Crossing borders II: Ravel’s theory and practice of jazz” discusses the many intriguing intricacies of how late 19^th century/early 20^th century ragtime and early, 1920s-era jazz was viewed by Ravel’s contemporaries, and how it was consciously adapted for use within the classical forms. Mawer points out the subtleties of how Ravel was able to impart a French “accent” to these American vernacular idioms.

Ravel Studies is an outstanding addition to the Ravel literature and offers aficionados of French music, students, musicologists, and sophisticated music lovers a series of concise, yet  in-depth and thoughtful essays about the music, life and times of this great master. Libraries with collections in these subject areas will also want to purchase the book. Highly recommended.

Ravel Studies, edited by Deborah Mawer, Cambridge University Press 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-88697-0. 220 pages, hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

Arnold Schoenberg, by Bojan Bujic. Phaidon Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7148-4614-9. 240 pages, hardcover, with 80 black and white illustrations.

Having read and reviewed three recent books on Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) within the last several years, I have to wonder from whence the interest in this still much-misunderstood 20^th century master emanates.

I’d venture a guess that—not as much heard as analyzed, respected but not loved by conservative classical aficionados —Schoenberg’s former infamy has transmogrified to grudging acceptance by mainstream audiences. Hence, the need to know more about him and his legacy: transitioning from post-Mahler/Strauss/Busoni acolyte to boundary-breaking Expressionist; from free atonalist to conjuring the 12-tone method; from early mentor to Webern and Berg in Berlin and Vienna to escaping Hitler, emigrating to America and becoming a professor at the University of Southern California and at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Reading Bujic’s wonderfully evocative biography, “respected but not loved” seems to be the running theme throughout Schoenberg’s career. The composer struggled mightily to create what he saw as a progressive style, building upon Bach and Brahms. Key to this difficulty was the inability of Schoenberg’s mature works to convince audiences that what they heard was the logical extension of Brahms and Mahler, with the use of “continuing variation” trumping literal, comforting repetition. Clearly, it was “the emancipation of the dissonance,” organized into a systematized modus operandi (the twelve-tone method) that proved the stumbling block. Perhaps Schoenberg went too far, in demanding so much of listeners, to ever achieve popular acceptance.

Bujic addresses exactly this point when he writes, “At the close of the 16^th century, Renaissance artists had been deliberately searching for a quality of ‘difficulty,’ believing that the effort needed to surmount it gave rise to virtue. Schoenberg’s attitude had a distant affinity with this – especially where it concerned the synthesis of the aesthetic and the ethical.”

Schoenberg’s opinion of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism, post-“Pulcinella” (1920) proves the point from the opposite perspective: “(Schoenberg) saw in Stravinsky’s new conservatism a capitulation, a refusal to think the task of composition through, and a facile appropriation of stylistic properties of a past age as though from a box of props.”

As he saw himself the inheritor and promulgator of the great and noble Austro-German classical tradition, it becomes sad to trace the gradual disillusionment Schoenberg felt, as he lived long enough to see that tradition die a slow but inevitable death after two World Wars, Hitler and anti-Semitism, and a “coarsening of the culture” as typified by the “trickster” Stravinsky, with Schoenberg entering old age, living in Southern California and feeling as a displaced person. In a 1946 letter to the painter Oskar Kokoschka, Schoenberg wrote: “You complain of lack of culture in this amusement-arcade world. I wonder what you’d say to the world in which I nearly die of disgust.”

This book, more effectively than others I’ve recently read on Schoenberg, tears at you, as it gets to his heart, mind, and soul. Beautifully written and deeply moving, I’d recommend it especially to those who truly want to understand Schoenberg – to get beyond the façade of aloofness, “difficulty” and the veneer of intellectual and moral rigor he assumed – to approach the man himself. This is a biography; thankfully, there are no turgid musical analyses and post-Schenkerian graphs to wade through, and it is written with compassion; all the better to see the man behind the self-protective mask of severity.

This is beautifully made book, as are all Phaidon publications, and it’s filled with wonderful photographs (Schoenberg with Einstein and Leopold Godowsky; with Francis Poulenc [!], and with Charlie Chaplin), among many others.

My only criticism is that the font is too small for nearsighted and aged eyes, requiring close and somewhat strained reading. This book would make a most worthy addition to every music library with contemporary music and composer biography collections.

James Levine—40 Years at the Metropolitan Opera, compiled by the editorial staff at Amadeus Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-57467-196-4. 230 pages, softcover, with color and B&W photos throughout.

Now, with the recent resignation of James Levine as conductor and Music Director of the Boston Symphony and the cancellation of most of his Metropolitan Opera duties for the remainder of this season due to persistent ill health, comes a book celebrating his 40-year legacy at that institution. It’s hard to imagine a more emotional tribute to the man who literally re-invented the Met. The reminiscences now seem tinged with sadness, as the Maestro’s infirmities over the past several years have taken their toll, and have forced him into near-retirement.

James Levine—40 Years at the Metropolitan Opera is a lovingly assembled tome, consisting of historic photographs, commentary by Levine, and interviews with the panoply of singers who worked with him for four decades.

The book—a stunningly handsome coffee table keepsake for opera lovers—is organized by decade, beginning with Levine’s first performance at the Met conducting Tosca, starring Grace Bumbry and Franco Corelli, and ending with his last documented work, Das Rheingold, in September, 2010, starring Bryn Terfel and Stephanie Blythe.

Martin Bernheimer, Harvey Sachs, Richard Dyer, Ara Guzelimian, and others punctuate the book with critical and perceptive essays honoring Levine.

Whatever his imminent future on the podium, it is touching to read James Levine’s last words, which are a postscript to the history the book so lovingly documents. “For an American kid, the Met has always been an opera mecca temple. I made it a prime life commitment.”

Music libraries with opera and/or musical theatre collections will want to purchase this beautiful and moving volume of tributes to one of the greatest conductors of the last 100 years—a musician who has already passed into legend.

– Steve Dankner

Chamber Music – a Listener’s Guide, by James M. Keller

Chamber Music – a Listener’s Guide is a well-thought-out and excellently written reference work for the traditional music lover, avid listener, or concertgoer. 56 composers’ works are covered in moderate depth, with a sprinkling of biographical data, followed by a program note on the particular work at hand. A nice touch is the set of “who, what, when, where, why” factoids and instrumentation notes that introduces each work. The commentaries also include notes on the critical reception of the works in question on the part of the composers’ colleagues and music critics.

This is a rather old-fashioned, though still useful text, focusing on the unvarnished masterpieces of classical music. Many of the canonical works are discussed here: 17 of Brahms‘ 24 chamber pieces; many works by Haydn and Mozart, of course; popular pieces such as the Arensky Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Grieg’s string quartet, and so on. A very few fairly recent works by Osvaldo Golijov, George Crumb and Joan Tower are covered. But it’s the “old masters” that get the lion’s share of attention, which is fair, given the author’s intent.

One wonders what the future holds for books like this one, which is basically a compendium of program notes, in these days of the Web and its incomparable reach. Yes, of course — inaccuracies abound online. What with Wikipedia and the unfiltered scope of Google, you can’t trust what pops up in your search engine. You can trust Keller, though. A former program annotator for the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony, he is a very readable writer, and to his credit, his notes are well researched and have a point of view that details the backstory of the piece under discussion; there are relatively few arcane, analytical/technical digressions to slow down or sidetrack the narrative. In the end, reading Keller’s engaging notes makes you want to hear the piece — a sure sign of good, descriptive music writing.

A very similar book, though, and still in print, is Melvin Berger’s Guide to Chamber Music, first published in 1985 and reprinted by Dover in 2001. Berger’s Guide… serves the same purpose and isn’t out of date (Berger is writing about essentially the same works). Given the choice, I would go for Keller’s, as the text is less academically discursive and more personal than Berger’s, though there are more similarities than contrasts between the two. Recommended.

Chamber Music – a Listener’s Guide by James M. Keller. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-538253-2. 494 pages, hardcover

The Music of Painting – Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage, by Peter Vergo

Once in a while a book comes along in which ideas coalesce in new and transformative ways. Such is the case with Peter Vergo’s The Music of Painting – Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage. Vergo’s insights into the creative worlds of painting and music are truly revelatory and will delight the reader.

Vergo, a Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, England, is an expert on German and Austrian art, and has previously written books about Wassily Kandinsky and art in Vienna, among others. Kandinsky was a polymath: a painter, playwright and art theorist. In essence, he was the first modern painter to develop abstraction. The dialogue between him and the composer Arnold Schoenberg who was also a painter, led to seminal breakthroughs in formulating modes of abstraction and the Expressionist aesthetic in both music and visual art in the years just prior to World War I.

Vergo touches on these interactions, but there is much more in this exploratory book than early 20^th century art. The author’s focus is broad-ranging, beginning with the music dramas of Richard Wagner and his revolutionary influence on Baudelaire, the Impressionist painters (particularly Seurat and Gauguin), Claude Debussy and many others.

Regarding the cross-pollination of aesthetics between music and painting, Gauguin is quoted: “Using the pretext of any kind of subject matter borrowed from life or from nature, by arranging lines and colors I obtain symphonies, harmonies…”

Vergo also refers to the music of earlier times when he traces the influence of each art upon the other, creating a composite duality, such as in the case of J.S. Bach, about whom he quotes Pierre Boulez: “I would go so far as to say that they (Bach’s canons) offer almost more sustenance for the eye than for the ear.”

There is much more that Vergo elucidates: James McNeil Whistler’s “harmonies,” “nocturnes,” symphonies” and “variations” (the titles of his paintings); Skryabin and his ‘color symphony’ Prometheus: The Poem of Fire; Messiaen’s synesthesia-influenced music; the relationship and mutual influence of Picasso and Stravinsky; the influence of jazz and “boogie-woogie” on Piet Mondriaan; Calder’s influence on Cage, Earle Brown and Morton Feldman, and on and on – the myriad influences of music on painters, and painting on composers.

We are a long way here from Walter Pater’s dictum “All art aspires towards the condition of music.” After reading Vergo, one understands that music and visual art are, or at least can be, truly symbiotic.

The Music of Painting… is a lavishly produced book, as are all Phaidon publications. There are ample illustrations of both painting and music, though I wish there were even more, to match the full extent of the visual art references. This is a book to study and contemplate, not to read quickly, but to savor. Libraries with sections on general music history, aesthetics and philosophy and contemporary art and music (it belongs in both subject areas) would do well to add this necessary volume to their collections. Most highly recommended.

The Music of Painting – Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage, by Peter Vergo. Phaidon Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7148-5762-6. 367 pages, hardcover.

– Steve Dankner