The Lives of the Great Composers
(Third Edition)
by Harold C. SchonbergW.W. Norton & Company
hardcover, 653 pages, 24cm x 17cm
Published April 1997
ISBN 0-393-03857-2by Ong Yong Hui
This forbidding tome with the 'classic'-looking cover and the occasional black and white composer portraits among six hundred-odd pages is, seriously, not half as serious as it seems. As the title clearly states, it is a book on the composers' life stories, complete with those which-year-did-what information, but only for the important events. Generally there's much more written about the composers then their music, but happily the latter aspect is not neglected. Don't expect boring musical analyses of the "Now the music goes to the dominant of D minor, with a soaring melody ... blah blah..." sort though.
This book might serve more as an interesting biography than a really detailed one, but it is quite adequate to me - just consider the number of composers the book deals with! Not also is a brief background of the composer provided, but there is also a focus on the influences on the composers and how their music is shaped by their beliefs. Going chronologically, it also traces musical history when the individual composers are shown to have their place among classical music's evolution through the periods. The three Bs (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms), operatic composers (Monteverdi, Gluck and Puccini etc), "nationalists" such as Glinka and Bartók (right) to songwriters like Hugo Wolf; none of them are ignored here.
Of course, all this contributes to the mass of this bulky volume, yet it is never a boring read because Harold C. Schonberg (b.1915) does not bother to start every chapter with the birth of the composer and work up from there. Like narrating a personal story to the reader in a lecture, the words are natural and informal, hooking the reader's interest with anecdotes everywhere. To hear from him telling us how Schubert lived with two friends which among them "there was no such thing as private property" or Charles Ives believing "pretty-pretty music (which is almost everything to him) meant compromise", there is the sense that a real person is being described rather than some faceless composer with a background.
All this strong characterisation of the composers invariably means subjectivity comes into the picture. For one thing, the length devoted to the composers is already quite a fair indication of the author's biases - just like the Inkpot's! More is written about Wagner (left), probably due to his notoriety, than Bach; Liszt, Debussy and Schubert have the same amount of attention in the book. Berlioz surprisingly tops these three, and Schonberg has more to say about him then the immortal Beethoven! It seems unfair to lump Sibelius together with the 'European Nationalists', devote three pages to him, and totally neglect to mention about his affinity with nature in his music. On a similar note of caution to fans, Mahlerians would probably want to skip away the scant pages on Mahler; Schonberg dismisses the "swollen dance movements" of his symphonies as "sentimental evocations...dripping with earnest", describes the "cosmic movements" as being "hysterical" and state that "to make Mahler, as many have done, a modern symbol is to misunderstanding modernism and to misunderstand Mahler. His questions about life were trite..."...and I think no Mahler fan can bear the rest here.
But then Schonberg does champion some underdogs in the shadows of the great composers like Verdi and Mussorgsky. Liszt is argued to be an enthusiastic champion of avant-garde music everywhere, a composer who accepted his contemporary colleagues' new ideas and always sought to learn from them with humility. Schonberg even manages to find in Bartók a person who shares his conviction in Liszt, quoting him hailing Liszt's "absolutely new imaginative concepts". The introverted Schumann is not only defended for his music's Romantic language, but also praised for being a generous and conscientious critic, editor of his own music journal the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. It is apparent that Schonberg gives credit to those composers who helped in music's progress in other ways than composing groundbreaking works like the "Eroica".
I would advise one to take this book for what it is, its personal comments, frankness, witticism and all. It is interesting at the very least and downright funny at times, and definitely worth the money and time on it. I just cannot bear the thought of missing all the interesting (read: juicy) details about the operatic composers even though I am not an opera person, and I didn't regret reading them all in the end, particularly all the scandals about Wagner the Ego; probably the best chapter of the book! Read to believe that palatable biographies exists.
This book is available at Borders and Tower Books. A paperback version exists and sells for S$40 at Tower/Suntec City.
Ong Yong Hui thinks that the explicit frankness and occasional biases in this book reminds him of....The Flying Inkpot!
Back to the Classical Index!... or read previous book reviews and features from the Inkvault archives!Other classical music reviews by this or any other writer can be obtained from the InkVault by doing a key word search with the writer's name.
434: 21.3.1999 ©Ong Yong Hui
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