An unflattering portrait of Germany’s most popular modern classical composer, mitigated by hearty appreciation for his musical genius. Richard Strauss (1864—1949) aspired to follow in the mighty footsteps of Beethoven and Wagner, and this forthright promoter of “New German” music certainly equaled the former in arrogance and the latter in distasteful (though decidedly intermittent) anti-Semitism. Best known today for the opening chords of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (brilliant or bombastic, depending on whom you ask) and several of the very few canonical 20th-century operas (most notably Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, and Ariadne auf Naxos), Strauss won fame early as a conductor as well as a composer; English music producer and editor Boyden offers an especially juicy depiction of the rancid infighting in Greater Germany’s musical capitals, from Berlin to Vienna, where the young artist made his name while undercutting ostensible friends like Gustav Mahler. The author also convincingly argues that, despite his reputation for shocking subjects and aggressively “modern” scores, Strauss was in fact the last of the 19th-century romantics, “an end, not a beginning” (though Boyden also makes a nice case for Rosenkavalier and Ariadne as postmodern works of pastiche and irony). Strauss emerges in this biography as self-absorbed and selfish, the musician-as-businessman more concerned with success than artistic integrity, unable to understand those less effortlessly populist than he. His collaboration with the Nazis, to whom he handed priceless propaganda opportunities by remaining in Germany and even substituting for conductors dismissed for political reasons, is evaluated by Boyden as more a matter of willed blindness than active evil, but nonetheless shameful. Although the author retains his admiration for Strauss as “one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music,” his solid but not especially vivid descriptions of the music may not convince all readers of this claim’s justice. Judicious, well-balanced, and thoughtfully argued, though its readability would be enhanced by a little more passion either for or against the unpleasant Herr Strauss. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1999
ISBN: 1-55553-418-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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