Customer Reviews

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) (Cambridge Music Handbooks)

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Let me start with a disclaimer. I haven't read this book and don't want anyone to be misled or misguided into thinking that this note is anything other than what it is - a "proceed with caution" sign.

I ran into this book while trying to track down alternate versions of Mengelberg's recording of Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. The Amazon search engine took me to excerpts from this book and, since they looked interesting, I looked into the pages cited. What I found was a swamp of the worst attacks against Mengelberg, Furtwangler, and Karajan as Nazi functionaries. The complexities of the relationships of those indisputably great artists with the totalitarian regime they had to live with is ironed into the flatness of a propaganda poster and we learn, for example, that Karajan joined the Nazi party twice with the implication that this was because he was such an enthusiast for the party's agenda (not because, as a foreigner in Germany, penniless at the beginning of his professional career, he would not be allowed to work without party membership and because the documentation of his membership was lost when he got a new job - what would joining twice have meant, that he was really, really a committed Nazi and therefore entitled to great patronage in his search for work? If that were the case, he [and every other ambitious artist in Germany at the time] would have joined the party twice or more a year on the theory that many memberships would yield many membership points, somewhat like what the airlines would later do with frequent fliers.), that Furtwangler would do whatever the Nazis wanted (which was far from the complete truth) and that Mengelberg made himself into a poster child for the Dutch collaborationist regime (which, again is far from what was really going on).

Good history - you could start with RIchard Osborne's excellent (and clear-eyed) biography of Karajan - shows the complexity of these issues and of the people who had to deal with them - and that the kind of moral cheap grace displayed by Mr. Jackson here is of more value as self-congratulation than as a useful look into how real people responded to real world questions.

In fairness, this is a book about a Tchaikovsky symphony, not about the moral issues of performers under repressive regimes, but I have serious doubts about the capacity for analysis or clear thought of an author who could go off the rails so easily on this issue.

To end where I began (sort of), I don't know much of what this gentleman wrote about the music itself. It might, for all I know, be of a completely different order than is his analysis of the actions of the musicians that I briefly discussed above. But that analysis is so shallow and lacking in insight that it makes me wonder about the likely quality of the rest of the book.