TEN MASTERPIECES OF MUSIC

Esteemed music critic Sachs gets personal with this effervescent homage to some favorite works of “life-giving and affirmative” classical music. He chose these pieces, all in different genres, because he felt he had “something useful to say about them,” and he deftly shows how biography informed the music, each piece neatly fitting into its time and place. The more musically inclined reader will especially appreciate the brief explications of their key components. Mozart wrote his “profoundly moving” Piano Concerto in G Major in 1784 during a hectic and busy period; it was a “work of exceptional beauty and depth” that exhibited “previously unexplored regions.” Beethoven composed Trio in B-flat major, a “work of great breadth,” in 1811, 20 years after Mozart’s death. Its debut, an attending composer wrote, “was not a treat,” for the “piano was badly out of tune.” But Beethoven “minded little” because he was now deaf which, Sachs writes, likely led “him into previously unexplored regions of musical creativity.” One of the torchbearer’s at Beethoven’s funeral was Schubert, who, while ill, would compose his last and “greatest” string quartet, in G major. “I propose the hypothesis,” writes the author, “is ‘about’…trying to accept the nothingness of death.” Hector Berlioz used Goethe as a “springboard” for his Damnation of Faust, which “arouses admiration, fascination, and joy,” and he had the “audacity” to send Goethe a copy of the score. Verdi’s opera Don Carlo, writes Sachs, was “another milestone in the extraordinary biography of a master whose beginnings had been exceptionally unpromising.” After enthusiastically delving into the String Quintet in G Major by Brahms, the “spiritual devastation” of Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony, and Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 8, Sachs concludes with a section on the “pungent physicality” of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, “among the most intensely spiritual pieces of the twentieth century."