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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The teachers didn't know....., September 23, 2009
This review is from: Secret Lives of Great Composers (Paperback)
Artists, authors and now composers. The dryly humorous series continues, telling you things that would have music class much more interesting had the teacher only known. It, albeit unintentionally I'm sure, humanizes its subjects and blows the dust off of their histories. Wagner in pink lingerie indeed....
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful, just wonderful, April 10, 2011
This review is from: Secret Lives of Great Composers (Paperback)
As a musicologist I think this book gives a glimpse into the more human side of the composers in question. Too often their lives read like a hero story, and usually not a particularly good one at that. This doesn't do the music any favour, I believe, since most of us are human enough to be more interested in music made by a person whose life story we can identify and, at least to a certain degree, sympathise with (this, I believe, can work the other way around too; Wagner's music is given a fascinating sheen because the character who made it is so utterly repulsive). While perhaps not always pleasurable, these anecdotes show how composers also were men, who, for all of their pockmarks, is far more interesting than the marble statues their mothers would not have been able to recognise. I would certainly recommend this book to everyone interested in classical music, middle school teachers desperate for something to make the pupils pay attention in music classes, and, perhaps most importantly, as a gift to your local conservative who upholds the classical tradition as a moral alternative to corrupt popular culture.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
too many mistakes, May 10, 2011
This review is from: Secret Lives of Great Composers (Paperback)
Sometimes, there comes a point in reading a book when the reader stops reading for new information and starts noticing all the errors. This is one of those error-prone books that could have used a proofreader. French-born George Sand is not an English novelist. (p. 86) Puccini's Turandot is not "Turnadot." (p. 156 and p. 158) Madame Butterfly is not a slave. The author has her confused with Liu. (p. 153) Rossini's Barber of Seville is only two acts long. ("...hissed and jeered every act." p. 60) SpellCheck cannot catch homophones the way a human can, so we get incredibly bizarre errors. There are multiple uses of "lead" as the past tense of "lead." The book gives us juicy stories about composers from Vivaldi to Glass, but the heavy sarcasm of the author's voice gets very old very fast. This is the sort of thing that might be enjoyed just one chapter or two at a time. Some of the material is old and well-known (Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bernstein). Other material touches on semi-fresh ground, to me at least, such as Ives and Elgar.
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