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The Lives of Great Composers de Harold C.…
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The Lives of Great Composers (1970 original; edició 1970)

de Harold C. Schonberg (Autor)

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689733,028 (4.04)1 / 5
This updated and expanded edition of the perennial favorite traces the line of composers from Monteverde to the tonalists of the 1990s. Schonberg discusses the lives and works of the foremost figures in classical music, weaving a fabric rich in detail and anecdote. Photos.
Membre:pre20cenbooks
Títol:The Lives of Great Composers
Autors:Harold C. Schonberg (Autor)
Informació:Norton, 1970, First Edition
Col·leccions:La teva biblioteca
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The Lives of the Great Composers de Harold C. Schonberg (1970)

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Es mostren 1-5 de 7 (següent | mostra-les totes)
It's rare for a writer to express strong opinions without running off the rails with the facts. Schonberg's biographies of composers (I have the 1981 edition) is strongly opinionated and yet (as far as I can tell) factually accurate. You may disagree with him, even be infuriated with him, but you'll get a lot of information about the composers and their connections with each other. I hadn't previously known that Debussy liked cats better than people (clearly a wise man). The descriptions of how composers were received in their own time are especially interesting. There were rivalries and alliances, just as there are today. The book should be findable in used bookstores or on eBay. ( )
1 vota GaryMcGath | Jun 19, 2020 |
The tone of this book is as comforting as a cool blanket on a warm night.

From the movie "Last Action Hero"
Jack Slater : [John Practice has just betrayed Slater] Danny told me not to trust you. He said you killed Mozart.
John Practice : Mo- who?
Jack Slater : -zart. ( )
  MartinEdasi | Aug 10, 2019 |
First published in 1971, this magisterial one-volume book contains brief but erudite commentaries on the bulk of composers anyone would really want to know about.

In a 'Postlude', Schonberg comments on classical music post-World War II and says that none of the post-war composers have made any impact on the bulk of the classical repertoire, or the consciousness of the public. He declines to offer a view as to whether some musical form or other will capture that imagination, though he hints that the film composer might well fill part of that void. But overall, he says that there has been "a hiatus" in the stream of great composers which stretched unbroken from the time of Bach.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Shostakovich was still alive and composing in 1971; and there have been a few contemporary superstars that have arisen since then - Tippett, Williamson, Maxwell Davies, Lutoslawski, Stockhausen, Rorem and Turnage are just a few that come to mind. Oddly, Benjamin Britten is relegated to a virtual footnote on opera since Puccini. The Minimalists - Glass, Adams, Reich and Nyman - were a few years in the future and still brash young students when Schonberg was writing. And it's always possible to argue for re-discovered composers - Alkan, Brian and Lloyd are my candidates.

But these are minor quibbles. By the time anyone gets round to enthusing over the names I've mentioned, they're already well-immersed in the world of classical music. But this book should be the back-stop on their shelves as it is on mine. ( )
2 vota RobertDay | Apr 25, 2016 |
I rarely read biography, especially biographies of writers and other artists. I assume anything worth knowing about them is in their art, that the source of their creativity is a different self from the person the artists’ friends and family and public know. Also, artists are notoriously mistaken about themselves. You could even say they know themselves less well than does the average person who would no more think of writing a poem or a symphony than s/he would sign up to take a trip to the moon. Notorious bigots, if they happen to be good writers, create sympathetic characters whom by right they should be portraying in the worst light. Think Anthony Trollope’s MP in The Way We Live Now. And walking saints can produce pap and cant. But not always. Chekhov was saintly in some ways, and no one has matched him as a short story writer.

And then there’s the question of biography being just another form of fiction, or at least being as much about the author of the biography as about the subject.

Even so, I overcame my aversion, made an exception, as it were, for Harold C. Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers and then for his The Lives of the Great Pianists. The reason is my schoolboy-like adoration of classical musicians. I know what neurotic jerks writers usually are (I’m one myself…a writer, I mean). But I put great composers and their interpreters high up on pedestals–or did until I read Mr. Schonberg’s books.

This “lives of” genre, of course, started with the medieval Lives of the Saints, and continued in the Renaissance with Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, which tells you something about how Western culture has progressed or a least changed its focus over the last thousand years. By the 19th century artists pretty much had a clear field to themselves, and they played it for all it was worth.

Not that the Bachs, Chopins and Prokofievs or Liszts, Hofmanns and Horowitzes come off badly in these books. If anything, Schonberg is an even bigger groupie than I am, though much better qualified to see his subjects’ moral and social warts. It’s not a matter of any one of the greats being brought down a peg or two by what he puts in these volumes but of a cumulative impression one is left with and the standards of value by which a modern musicologist like Schonberg (not to be confused, by the way, with the 20th century composer Arnold Schoenberg) evaluates them and their work.

I don’t know why I was so naïf as to think musicians were not, like fiction writers, subject to the academic bent for seeing art as a progressive historical process classifiable into schools and periods: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Post-Romantic, Modern, Post-Classical and God knows what else. Scholar’s minds work that way. But it never occurred to me that great musicians could fall for that kind of silliness. They create because they are moved to do so, and what comes out of them is the only thing possible. Or, so I had thought.

But they were in fact frequently all too conscious of the imperative to be innovative, if not always original. Truly great artists break the molds, create new forms, because the content of their art, what they must express, demands new forms. Beethoven didn’t have to think about in what ways he could show up Haydn and out-Mozart Mozart. He spent a few years under the influence of those two, but then found his own voice, matching it to the powerful creation inside him. He didn’t innovate for the sake of innovation. The content of his art dictated the form and the expression.

But others were more self-conscious. Brahms was looked down on as old-fashioned by the school that saw Wagner as the future of music, and then of course Wagner suffered the same fate, until by the time we reach the twentieth century composers would rather die than be thought anything less than avant garde. In consequence we got a dogged academic adherence to innovation for its own sake (and, perhaps, more tellingly, combined with mediocrity) that has driven otherwise sympathetic listeners in our own time to rock and jazz (which have their own issues with innovation for innovation’s sake).

The backbiting that went on in this fight to be at the head of the pack is worthy of a high school locker room. It’s embarrassing to read some of the things composers said about each other, and no doubt still do. I suppose they did so partly to keep their stock up in their own estimations. Unless they were fools they knew what Bach or Beethoven meant to music no matter how they tried to trash them with glib asides (they probably stayed up nights thinking up those nasty one-liners). What’s more disconcerting is the way they worried about their place at the cutting edge of their art. God forbid they should write something that was behind the times. Ever onward. The past, if not prologue, is something to be spurned. Who can write as if there had been no Wagner? Or no Stravinsky? Well, Brahms could, for one. And Rachmaninoff for another.

We’ve seen the same thing in literature. Who could expect to be taken seriously as a serious writer unless s/he wrote in a post-Joycean style? Not Saul Bellow. Not John Updike. And then who could expect to get the lit-crit establishment’s seal of approval if they ignored the tenets of Post-Modernism? How many first-rate talents have succumbed to this orthodoxy and diminished their talents rather than end up as, God forbid, “popular” writers?

Walter Kaufmann, best known as the translator of Frederic Nietzsche, pointed out that all the great philosophers were what today would be considered amateurs. Maybe something similar could be said about great writers and composers. The best educated in their craft are self-educated, i.e. they learn by experiencing others’ art. Frequently they are mentored by another great talent. But with the ascendance of the academy and its minions we have just the opposite situation: a cadre of mediocrities mass-produced and as conformist in their thinking and creations as any mainline clergyman.

It’s in the nature of the academy to foster conformity and uniformity, even when it professes to want the opposite. The firestorm of petty invective and personal insult that met B. R. Myers’s A Reader’s Manifesto a few years back showed just how sensitive and insecure the establishment is to any questioning of its authority. The Inquisition was liberal-minded by comparison.

Schonberg seems surprisingly deaf to the diktats of the establishment of which he is of course a part. But I still say “surprisingly,” because the man is nothing if not a passionate lover of music–all music, it seems, though he is lukewarm about some composers I would think he would be enthusiastic about–Prokofiev, for example, who managed to write fabulous music despite the towering presence of Stravinsky. And how dare he! (I mean Schonberg) leave out George Gershwin in a book like this, while including, not to mention–not to mention–infinitely less talented contemporary composers.

Even so, The Lives of the Composers is a valuable book, as is The Lives of the Great Pianists, if only as an introduction to the subject, or subjects. A decent bibliography of related readings is included; musicians then as now are a garrulous and scribbling lot. ( )
2 vota Venantius | Sep 26, 2011 |
Stand Schonberg's Lives up against Milton Cross' Lives and Schonberg's is liable to topple over first. ( )
  jburlinson | Apr 5, 2011 |
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This updated and expanded edition of the perennial favorite traces the line of composers from Monteverde to the tonalists of the 1990s. Schonberg discusses the lives and works of the foremost figures in classical music, weaving a fabric rich in detail and anecdote. Photos.

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