The epic life and art of the famed Italian conductor.
In his lifetime, Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) was considered the greatest conductor of all, and music historian Sachs (Curtis Institute of Music; The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, 2010, etc.) makes a strong case for that assessment with judicious quotations from contemporary sources. They reveal an exacting taskmaster, feared for his brutal criticisms of singers and orchestra members, who could also be a gentle instructor and a steadfast support—if he felt they were working hard enough. He drove no one harder than himself: a musical prodigy from a family in straitened circumstances, Toscanini won admittance to Parma’s prestigious Royal School of Music when he was 9 and conducted his first orchestra at 19. He gained early success in opera, serving as chief conductor of La Scala in Milan and then New York’s Metropolitan Opera, but he achieved his broadest popular reach leading the NBC Symphony Orchestra’s weekly radio broadcasts beginning in 1937. He awed performers and audiences by conducting without a score and was revered for his attention to detail and fidelity to the composer’s intentions. Sachs creates a well-rounded portrait of this admirable artist and not entirely admirable man, noting that Toscanini proclaimed devotion to his wife while philandering well into his 70s. The biographer has nothing but admiration, however, for Toscanini’s principled anti-fascism, which led him to leave La Scala and to refuse to continue at Bayreuth, where he was the first non-German conductor. The author also praises Toscanini in his prime as an advocate for new music and living composers; if the conductor’s tastes grew more conservative over time, Sachs reminds us that this was part of a broader trend, as classical music and opera receded from the mainstream to rely on an established, mostly 19th-century canon. This minutely detailed chronicle of Toscanini’s jam-packed life offers more than casual readers will want to know, but music lovers will savor every evocative word.
Sweeping yet meticulous, appreciative without eschewing critical judgments—like Toscanini himself.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-271-6
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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