|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
by Ross Duffin
|
Passionate Practice: The Musician's Guide to Learning, Memorizing, and Performing by Margret Elson |
by Jane Glover
|
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Like contrapuntal voices in a Bach fugue, the lives of an aging composer and a young dictator are intertwined and interlocked in this absorbing cultural history. Gaines (The Lives of the Piano), former managing editor of Time, Life and People magazines, begins by recounting Frederick's abrupt summons of Bach to his court at Potsdam. Here, in an apparent effort to humiliate the old-style composer, Frederick, enamored of the new in philosophy and art, sets Bach a succession of seemingly impossible musical challenges: to each, the composer responds with unthinkable genius, culminating in his Musical Offering. But beneath the biographical counterpoint traced by Gaines is a longer, unfinished duel between two visions of humankind--one that the sensitive and musically inclined Frederick was also fighting within himself. He had been brutally abused by his father and was increasingly committed to the cynical pursuit of military expansion; the sun gradually sets on the Prussian king, who is consumed by disillusionment, inflicting pain on himself and countless others. As night falls on the (un)enlightened despot, Bach's star begins to rise, and later, he will acquire the veneration his genius merits, his music a perennial reminder that "the light of reason can blind us to a deeper kind of illumination." Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
In 1747, Bach met Frederick the Great; it was not a meeting of the minds. Gaines searches for the reasons behind the encounter in this book, which is part musicology, part dual biography. His exploration is clever without being frivolous, and explanatory without being effete. Formerly a magazine editor in the Time-Warner empire, Gaines writes very accessibly about classical music. He doesn't smother his topic in scholasticism, communicating his main idea that Bach's music is emphatically "message" music, that is, aural expressions of Lutheran theology. By contrast, Frederick, 27 years younger than Bach, regarded music as entertainment. Indeed, Frederick's choleric royal father thought music was effeminate and expressed his disapproval by beating Frederick and executing one of his friends. Thus Frederick brought a misanthropic cynicism to his night with Bach and thought it would be fun to embarrass the kapellmeister. In Gaines' rendition, Bach turned the tables and defied earthly power with one of his great works, Musical Offering. A marvelous story that will captivate the classical-music audience. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Entertainment > Music > History & Criticism
- Books > Entertainment > Music > Musical Genres > Classical
- Books > History > Europe > Germany
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
