Rich with wit and warmth, this compact biography is thoroughly enchanting.
An ideal introduction to understanding the famous composer.
A British broadcaster and renowned Beethoven expert, Suchet (The Last Waltz: The Strauss Dynasty and Vienna, 2016, etc.) is a terrific guide for general readers to delve into the life, art, and times of the great composer. It’s like attending a lively, entertaining, and informative lecture, with a slide show of illustrations going by in the background: here’s Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) as a young boy (Wolferl to his family), mischievously smiling, here’s the 16-year-old Beethoven playing the piano for the 31-year-old Mozart, who later said, “watch out for that boy; one day he will give the world something to talk about.” Suchet’s aim is to truly “reveal the man,” warts and all. Leopold, his always difficult, domineering father, saw the genius early on when, at age 3, Mozart could replicate what his talented older sister Nannerl was playing at the clavichord. He was soon playing the instrument (blindfolded, later), composing music, and teaching himself the violin. Leopold immediately saw a moneymaking opportunity and took both on a rigorous road tour, the first of many. Mozart was 6. Suchet notes that no “other composer travelled as much as Mozart.” Overall, it was 3,720 days, nearly one-third of his life. He never attended school, was forever on display, and was often ill. He worked constantly at composing, which was “as natural as breathing.” The author draws extensively on the many surviving letters to help fashion his discerning portrait of an often witty and happy genius who also delighted in the scatological. He lightly touches on many of Mozart’s compositions with just the right amount of analysis and opinion. The Marriage of Figaro “would change the face of opera.” Don Giovanni was his “finest, most complex, most dramatically and musically perfect opera.” Jupiter, Mozart’s final piece, written “with unhappiness around him,” is “indisputably his greatest symphony.”
Rich with wit and warmth, this compact biography is thoroughly enchanting.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-509-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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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