Mostly hits all the right notes, with several strong chapters easily outweighing the occasional miscue.
A look back on a life full of collaborative endeavors both onstage and behind the scenes.
In this solid memoir, Graf traces his influences and development as a professional artist and, more generally, as a human being. From his youth spent studying in New York City, he recalls the highly competitive culture that permeated Juilliard. He also provides unique perspectives for those who wonder about the inner workings of celebrated musical institutions: “In a jaded orchestral environment like the New York Philharmonic, only greenhorns and brown-nosers actually watch the conductor.” Eventually, Graf found his way to the Utah Symphony, where he performed as principal flutist for well over three decades. In addition, for 17 years he served as president of Local 104 of the American Federation of Musicians. Readers interested in this aspect of the lives of professional musicians may be disappointed by the section titled “President’s Messages—Local 104 Newsletters,” which presents fragments of union publications in a somewhat haphazard fashion, not even in chronological order. Instead, readers might benefit more by skipping to the tribute penned in 2011 by union attorney Joseph Hatch, which offers more cohesive, substantive details regarding Graf’s tenure as a labor leader. While the author’s recollections of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood are certainly well-written and informative, the most noteworthy chapter is “Seven Essays on the Dénouement of the Graf Family and the Closing of the Family Home,” in which Graf returns to Ann Arbor in middle age to face the declines and deaths of his parents, including his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s. This is a universal story told with power and heart, as in an eerie moment involving the possessions of a departed loved one: “I threw out my mother’s half-deteriorated alarm clock, and when I tossed the Hefty Bag with the forty others destined for junk, the alarm began ringing.” The strength of this moving section alone makes Graf’s memoir worth a read.
Mostly hits all the right notes, with several strong chapters easily outweighing the occasional miscue.Pub Date: April 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6233-7
Page Count: 120
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siäcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08394-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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