A deeply researched, gracefully told music history.
The destiny of one piano reveals changing attitudes about romantic music.
Composer, pianist, and music historian Kildea (Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, 2013, etc.), former artistic director of London’s Wigmore Hall, crafts an engrossing narrative focused on a singular piano on which, in 1838, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) composed 24 astonishing preludes. Living in Majorca with his lover, George Sand, Chopin found a piano made from local woods by artisan Juan Bauza. “Bauza’s instrument was out of date before it was completed,” writes the author, technologically more primitive than pianos constructed by the respected company Pleyel, in Paris, Chopin’s subsequent instrument of choice. The Bauza piano, Kildea asserts, contributed significantly to the unconventional sound of the Preludes, which garnered little attention when they were published in 1839. Robert Schumann was among the few who noticed, writing a “perplexed though ultimately admiring” review, calling them “ruins, eagle wings, a wild motley of pieces,” poetic, passionate, yet also containing “the morbid, the feverish, the repellent.” Chopin performed selections at private gatherings, eliciting similarly puzzled responses. Kildea offers a close technical and formal analysis of the pieces, concluding that “Chopin really did invent a new genre,” constructing patchworks “from the most brilliant but unexpected juxtapositions.” Suffering from stage fright, Chopin reluctantly gave public concerts; with the Bauza piano left behind in Majorca, he preferred “the soft attack, the hazy harmonics, the fine gradations between dynamics,” and the varying tones in different registers of the Pleyel instruments. Kildea also examines the evolution of piano construction in the 1830s and ’40s, “a Wild West” of experimentation and innovation. By the late 19th century, powerful new pianos, such as those made by the American firm Steinway, proved irresistible to pianists aiming for drama rather than the “thoughtful, intimate communications between composer, performer, and listener initiated by Chopin.” As the author chronicles many pianists’ interpretations of Chopin, Wanda Landowska emerges as an important champion. Besides performing and writing about Chopin’s works, she acquired the Bauza piano, whose later provenance Kildea carefully traces.
A deeply researched, gracefully told music history.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65222-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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