The book tells a story of contemporary classical music role in forming the narrative of the Holocaust, the Shoah. Jeremy Eisler is a brilliant stylist, verbally penetrating into music like few others. His book has passages, which are literary masterpieces in their own right.
Of course, I cannot question the author's choice of key figures. There are only four in the pages: Richard Strauss, the conformist; Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitry Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten. JE is little too fond of neo-romantic music for my taste. There is a incomplete list of composers and producers of music annihilated in the Shoah: Victor Ullmann, Peter Kein, David Beigelman, Paul Haas, Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein. Some survived: Karel Berman and Hans Adler.
However, he is right to the point that Schoenberg and Shostakovich worked out a musical idiom of the unspeakable even before the word "Holocaust" was coined.
No comments:
Post a Comment