A richly detailed life of a modernist master.
A musicologist offers a sensuous portrait of an iconic composer.
Drawing on many fine studies of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Walsh (Emeritus, Music/Cardiff Univ.; Musorgsky and His Circle, 2013, etc.) focuses on the composer’s music—daring and often misunderstood—to create a perceptive and authoritative new biography. A precociously gifted pianist, Debussy had achieved near-adult virtuosity by the age of 10, though he lacked “practical, or even moral, discipline,” rebelling against the narrow teachings at the Paris Conservatoire and the “rabid vocationalism of the average music student.” By the time he was 17, he decided to abandon the goal of becoming a concert pianist and, instead, become a composer. In 1885, he pursued that goal in Rome, where, again, he bristled against the “hated specifications and stereotyped criteria” at the Academy. His assessors deemed his compositions strange: He was preoccupied, they believed, with “the bizarre, the incomprehensible, the unperformable,” and warned him to “be on guard against that vague impressionism which is one of the most dangerous enemies of truth in works of art.” Undaunted, over the next few years, he honed a unique style, “subtle and resonant,” inspired by “the astoundingly rich and suggestive imagery” of poems of Verlaine and Baudelaire. Walsh sees 1890 as a breakthrough year for Debussy, in which he met the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who invited him to write incidental music for a stage performance. Mallarmé, writes the author, “opened doors…that would broaden his literary and artistic horizons.” Soon, he mastered orchestral music. Walsh praises Nuages for its “refined juxtapositions of colours, melodic, harmonic and instrumental” and Fêtes, for its “deftness and athleticism.” The ambitious Le Mer, Walsh writes, most clearly reflects Debussy’s “inflexibly meticulous, hyper-perfectionist approach to composition.” Perennially in debt and embroiled in domestic problems, Debussy felt, he explained, an “invincible need to escape into myself,” unable to abide “strict observance of traditions, laws, and other obstacles.” He was dedicated to creating, and redefining, beauty, and as Walsh amply demonstrates, he brilliantly succeeded.
A richly detailed life of a modernist master.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3192-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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