Customer Reviews

Guide to Sonatas: Music for One or Two Instruments

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This book is a great help when writing program notes - my only reservation is that the movements for each work are not listed.

I enjoyed this book and learned much from it, and it may well be the best such compact resource on the subject. However, it has significant limitations. I don't think you'll get much out of most portions of the text except where you already know the particular piece and have it in your head, in which case you don't really need the book for it. Some of the material would be useful as "emergency program notes," such as if you find yourself listening to a piece on the radio and you want to read something about it, but I think most of the material is only mildly useful for such a purpose because it is too brief and limited. (I imagine that the actual program notes that Mr. Berger writes are more extensive.) And while the manner in which themes and sections are described is often quite excellent, in some instances I would barely recognize the theme or section from how it is described. Also, I would caution the reader that there are some outright errors -- I quickly noted two errors in the short chapter on Chopin.

A key aspect of such a book is the relative amount of space each thing is given, totally aside from the actual content; this is perhaps the main factor that conveys a thing's importance and interest. I think in most instances Mr. Berger does a very good job of this, but there seem to be some striking instances to the contrary. One example is the short shrift given to the last movement of Beethoven's "Tempest" sonata. Also I can't help noting that this movement is one of the pieces that seems to be mischaracterized. Such things are highly subjective of course, but I believe most readers would share these impressions and would feel that these aspects are more of a problem here than in most such books.

Do I regret buying the book? Not at all. I was looking for an interesting little book, and I got one. The material is well organized, there is much to enjoy and learn here (especially in those portions where you have the pieces in your head), and if you're looking for what I was looking for, you'll get it. And despite the book's shortcomings, it may well be the best such compact resource on the subject. Could it have been done better? Absolutely. In particular, it seems that the book might have benefited from some more careful and critical editing. I think an editor who was at all knowledgeable on the subject and who put himself in the place of the reader would have readily picked up on the noted shortcomings.

I don't agree that the book would be a particularly useful resource for writing program notes. For such a purpose, ideally the writer should study the music independently, but if he wishes to rely on a source, it should be a more extensive and reliable one.