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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Keen and gentle insight,
By "anodos12" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Great Conductors (Paperback)
Schonberg, the New York Times music critic of many years, writes here one from his series of books on music history. He takes a light yet well-informed approach to the conductors up through Bernstein, Maazel, and Mehta. His gentle sense of humor and love for music exude from this sentive work, which explores not only the technique of great conductors, but their lives and personalities as well. A fine light introduction to the history of conducting.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Great Conductors,
This review is from: The Great Conductors (Paperback)
It is wonderful tour de force of the author.Then, I thank to Amazon for letting me have a chance of getting this book. From Wager to Walter, even Ozawa and Davis (both of these two conductors were 'NEW FACE' at that time of publishing this old copy!) were mentioned. Regardless of containg what subject inside this book, the classic lovers should own this item.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A little dated, but an entertaining and enlightening read all the same,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: THE GREAT CONDUCTORS (Hardcover)
Harold C. Schonberg
The Great Conductors Simon & Schuster, Hardback, 1967. 8vo. 384 pp. First published in 1967. Contents Preface I. The Genus II. From Elias Salomon to Divided Leadership III. Bach and Handel IV. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven V. Orchestras Tuning and Audiences VI. The Arrival of the Stick VII. Weber and Spontini VIII. Francois-Antoine Habeneck IX. Hector Berlioz X. Mendelssohn and the German School XI. Richard Wagner XII. The Scene in England XIII. Franz Liszt XIV. Hans von Bülow XV. The Wagner School - Richter and Others XVI. America and Theodore Thomas XVII. The Big Three in France XVIII. Arthur Nikisch XIX. Karl Muck XX. Gustav Mahler XXI. Richard Strauss XXII. Felix Weingartner XXIII. The Italians and Toscanini XXIV. Willem Mengelberg XXV. Wilhelm Furtwängler XXVI. Bruno Walter XXVII. Sir Thomas Beecham XXVIII. Serge Koussevitzky XXIX. Leopold Stokowsky XXX. Otto Klemperer and the German School XXXI. The Modern French School XXXII. From Central Europe XXXIII. The Foreign-Born Contingent in the United States XXXIV. Leonard Bernstein XXXV. Present and Future Index ======================================== This one needn't be long. ''The Great Conductors'' is one of the most forgotten books by Harold Schonberg, unjustly so. Unlike his books about pianists and composers, the one dedicated to conductors has never been revised after its first publication in 1967. Of course some parts of it are quite dated: the chapter of Hans von Bülow, for instance, falls quite short of the splendid and recently published biography by Alan Walker. Much less can the book be used as a reference to modern conductors; indeed, it is funny to read about Seiji Ozawa, Colin Davis, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, Bernard Haitink or Claudio Abbado as the ''young generation'' - but in 1967 that's precisely what they were. But it is to be expected that a book published almost fifty years ago in a musicological area that almost no serious research had been done before, and a great deal have materialised since, must indeed be dated; and certainly Mr Schonberg never intended the book as modern reference - wisely so. Dwelling on these matters, however, is a perfect example of missing the point. Those who are familiar with Mr Schonberg's other books will not fail to notice his using very much the same method here, nor will they have any trouble recognising his unique writing style. As always, Mr Schonberg starts with compelling preface, excellently presenting and summarising the subject, and then continues to explore methodically and in chronological order how on earth that strange species, the modern conductor, emerged, developed and changed through the centuries. As it turned out, the species - or ''the genus'' as Mr Schonberg calls conductors in his highly amusing introductory chapter - is much more recent phenomenon than most people may think; not before the 1840s did the conductor in the modern sense of the word, a man with a baton and a sole master of the orchestra, come into existence. It was even later, only in the second half of XIX and the beginning of the XX century, that the professional conductor arose, that is a man who primarily was neither instrumentalist nor composer but conductor. One of the many captivating bits of history in Mr Schonberg's book is the fact that in earlier times the leader of an orchestra used a violin bow or even a rolled sheet of paper to direct the musicians, almost always he was not alone but had to share the power with another man, usually sitting on a keyboard instrument, in the so called ''divided leadership''. As for Mr Schonberg's style, it simply cannot be bettered; it is shamelessly readable, extremely entertaining and contains profound reflections that are far from negligible - at least for anybody trying to do some thinking. The most remarkable thing about Mr Schonberg's writing, however, is something I have repeatedly remarked upon: his stunning ability to bring to life people who have long since been dead. He has a theory that there is more than enough documentary evidence for one to make pretty accurate guess about the character and the musicianship of anybody who had the carelessness to die before the invention of the recording. Almost the whole book consists of portraits drawn with extraordinary vividness and rare psychological insight, not to mention the extensive analysis of baton technique and pretty much everything else connected with conducting; as usual, biography is deliberately suppressed but there is little enough of it to make the whole picture coherent. Under such conditions it does sound like an impossible task to remain eminently readable, a great fun and a great intellectual challenge at the same time. But Harold Schonberg certainly does remain so. Among the drawbacks of ''The Great Conductors'' are the usual ones encountered in Mr Schonberg's books. Sometimes he is somewhat careless with historical facts but that's perhaps to be expected; after all, Harold Schonberg certainly was no scholar, he was a journalist. But he also was an eminent music critic, an accomplished musician, a man with sharp intelligence, a good deal of common sense, a healthy dose cynicism and stupendous erudition when it comes to musical theory and history. There are no meticulous footnotes in Mr Schonberg's books, nor does he take the trouble always to indicate his sources (though he often does), but as a general rule he makes an informed guess how apocryphal certain story probably is. On the whole the reader is well advised to accept Mr Schonberg's numerous anecdotes with a pinch of salt; for those who have the time and the application, though the book uncharacteristically lacks a bibliography (perhaps because at the time there was scant literature on the subject), there are several important books and authors quoted between the pages. The only other caveat that comes to my mind is that Mr Schonberg may occasionally become a trifle sketchy, listing names of conductors as in the phone book, with little or no attempt for evaluating their place in the history of conducting. But that happens fairly seldom and never for more than a few lines. Here is the bottom line: no matter how controversial, opinionated or scholarly sloppy Mr Schonberg may be, his vivid characterisation, delightfully malicious style and especially his thought-provoking, often profound and stirring, lines completely redeem whatever shortcomings he might have. To take just one example of Mr Schonberg's fascinating duality, in his chapter of Franz Liszt he makes the rather audacious claim that the Hungarian composer never took his religion seriously but only made a great show of it; that's indeed a bold statement, not to say scurrilous, which does not appear to be shared by any Liszt scholar of distinction known to me. But on the other hand, Mr Schonberg dedicates a whole chapter to Liszt and examines into some detail his significant influence on XIX century conducting which has always been - as so many other aspects of Liszt's life and personality - vastly neglected or misrepresented; indeed, the second volume of Alan Walker's biography did make something of a revolution in assessing Liszt's place as a conductor - and it was written well over 20 years after Harold Schonberg's book. As a matter of fact, the last chapter of ''The Great Conductors'' is an ideal illustration of Mr Schonberg's considerable powers for reflection on serious matters, which he explores in more or less all of his books and which have the singular ability to stir unheard-of thoughts inside my head. Incidentally, this compelling last chapter has little to do with conducting, except for the very shrewd remark that there is not even one Austrian or German among the most promising young conductors of the time (see the first paragraph of this review), which is in so stark a contrast to the first part of the XX century that it most probably indicates a severe decline of the famous Austro-German conducting tradition. As usual though, Harold Schonberg touches a number of other topics than his primary one - and he does it splendidly. Some of his most profound observations here include the famous revival of baroque music that occurred after the Second World War. The explanation of this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon is actually rather simple: the largely anti-Romantic post-war zeitgeist simply matched to perfection the objective, academic, scholarly and musicological, or in short anti-Romantic, nature of the baroque music; most probably this is also the finest explanation why I personally so often find baroque music all but unlistenable. Another favourite theme on which Harold Schonberg has written a number of literary variations is the split - unique in the history of music - between the avant garde works of the contemporary composers and the general concert-going audience that occurred in parallel with the baroque revival. Yes, it certainly does raise some ''hard questions'': And, considering avant-garde music after World War II, never in music has there been kind of universal loathing that has been created. Which leads to some hard questions. Is this lack of rapport and communication necessary the public's fault? Has the composer failed in his function? Or has the language of music itself been exhausted? Needless to say, ''The Great Conductors'' is essential reading for every admirer of Harold Schonberg's books. It is rather a pity that he never made a revised and updated edition but this one, badly dated at places though it may be, still... Read more ›
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