Of particular interest to specialists but written with an authority and passion that will appeal to general readers as well.
From music scholar and biographer Lockwood (Emeritus, Music/Harvard Univ.; Beethoven: The Music and the Life, 2002, etc.), a close examination of nine works at the heart of the Western classical tradition.
“For Beethoven, the symphony was a lifetime preoccupation,” writes the author, who draws on the composer’s detailed and comprehensive sketchbooks to trace the evolution of this preoccupation from the “supremely competent” First Symphony through “Ode to Joy,” the stunning choral finale to the Ninth. Acknowledging the profound musical influence of Haydn, Mozart, and (in later years) Bach, Lockwood also points to the wildly popular plays of Friedrich Schiller as inspirations for what Beethoven wished to achieve in his symphonies: “the ability to stir large audiences to emotional depths they had not experienced before.” The author’s technical analyses of such factors as key, tempo, and instrumentation are likely to daunt casual music lovers, but each chapter also contains eloquent summaries of each symphony’s impact on listeners, both at the time of its premiere and over the centuries, and of its place within Beethoven’s overall artistic development. The titanic nature of his ambitions, and the centrality of the symphony to them, is evident from the time of the Third Symphony, with which, Lockwood writes, Beethoven “lifted the genre of the symphony onto a new plane of expression and grandeur.” While the composer is perhaps best known for that grandeur and for such forceful moments as the famous four-note opening of the Fifth Symphony (“Thus Fate knocks at the door,” Beethoven is said to have remarked), the author also evinces and elicits appreciation for the quieter pleasures of the Fourth and the Sixth, or “Pastoral,” displaying the composer’s profound love for nature. The epilogue movingly affirms Beethoven’s symphonies as “exemplars of what great music can still mean in our fragmented and pessimistic age.”
Of particular interest to specialists but written with an authority and passion that will appeal to general readers as well.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-07644-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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