The debeautification of a lonely, self-dramatizing, praise- seeking colossus, conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908-89), whom Swiss musicologist Bachmann esteems as a very great European conductor but a man trapped in fairy tales. While not focusing on Karajan's aesthetics, Bachmann makes clear that the set of 43 videodiscs now being released, which Karajan edited himself and which he hoped would enshrine his image as conductor for forthcoming generations, focus too largely on Karajan's minimalist conducting style in his final period and are far from spellbinding. Not always the clearest writer, Bachmann attempts to avoid a ``psychogrammatic'' view of Karajan and yet not settle merely for a rehearsal of the career. Karajan was a child prodigy, giving piano recitals at age four. His first important post was as musical director of the Stadttheater in Ulm, followed a few years later by a similar appointment with the Aachen Stadttheater (in ``the FÅhrer's city''). Two things are important here. He had seen Toscanini conduct Falstaff and been overwhelmed by the Italian's symphonic integration of stage work and orchestra. And he made his Faustian pact, foreseeing the value of joining the Nazis in Ulm and insuring his political rise in the musical world. Joseph Goebbels, interested in promoting a rival to Wilhelm FurtwÑngler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, appointed Karajan as State Kapellmeister, from which post he spread German music as State publicity—for motives that he hid from his later hagiographers, at whom Bachmann scoffs. The author strains to suggest that in 1940 a farsighted Karajan married his second wife, Anita, who was part Jewish, as a postwar safeguard for washing himself clean of the Nazis. The need for power drove Karajan to build the world's greatest recording and performing musical empire, featuring in Salzburg, his birthplace, Karajan festivals to himself. At his death, no one could replace him in his multiplicity of major posts. Despite an air of superiority, a compelling read—and excellent on Karajan's conducting style. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40628-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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