 | The late Harold Schonberg's third and final edition of this perennial favourite includes updated accounts of all the serialists, tonalists, minimalists, and other -ists who have bored and bewildered audiences during the last 50 years or so. (For such music to change, he quotes musicologist Robert P. Morgan as saying, "the world will have to change.") Elsewhere he provides chronological mini-histories of everyone from Monteverdi to Webern. Unpretentious to a fault, Schonberg writes for the intelligent layman, eschewing academic stuffiness in favour of making his subjects come alive. "I have tried to humanize the great composers, to give an idea of what they felt and thought," he writes. This is an unfashionable approach, he adds, "but I firmly believe that music can be explained by the man; indeed, must be explained by the man. For a man's music is a function of himself, and is a reflection of his mind and his reaction to the world in which he lives." And Schonberg indeed explains the man, providing superlative studies of supreme individualists such as Beethoven and Verdi. With not a dull sentence to be found in its 650 pages, this is a witty feast of a book. |
Lives of the Great Composers (Third Edition: 1997) by Harold C. Schonberg
