Thielemann’s revelations about the complexities of conducting are likely to enhance any music lover’s listening experiences.
A renowned conductor shares insights into the powerful works of Richard Wagner (1813-1883).
Currently conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden and artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, Thielemann recounts his long career in music in an illuminating look at his art, focusing on the composer that he believes represents the most “fundamentally significant experience” of music. The author was a young prodigy, awarded a contract at Berlin’s German Opera House when he was 19. In the following years, he rose through positions that he sees as essential to development of craftsmanship: co-répétiteur, répétiteur with duties as conductor, assistant conductor, second conductor, first conductor, general music director at small opera houses, general music director at first-ranked opera houses, guest conductor, and conductor of recordings, culminating in leadership of prestigious orchestras. There are no short cuts, the author maintains, to becoming a master. Early in his musical training, Thielemann became enraptured with Wagner, whose music, “unashamedly over the top,” cast a spell over him. The author reflects on Wagner’s use of myths “to create an international form of drama describing, on a gigantic scale, what happens when modern man forgets himself in striving for wealth and possessions.” The composer “balances on the line between the Romantics and the modern periods in music, between fairy tale and psychoanalysis.” Acknowledging Wagner’s anti-Semitism and Hitler’s admiration for his works, Thielemann maintains that music itself transcends politics. Much of the book reprises the themes, characters, and music of each Wagner opera, including evaluations of recordings. Tristan and Isolde, the author writes, arouses “feelings in me that I can hardly describe: sensuality, excitement, watchfulness, the wish for enjoyment.” Parsifal, in which Wagner melds German and French influences, shines, “living and shimmering in an almost Impressionist and very Latin way. It can be terrifying.”
Thielemann’s revelations about the complexities of conducting are likely to enhance any music lover’s listening experiences.Pub Date: May 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-125-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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