booksmusic

Building bridges from Baroque to modernity

Moritz von Bredow: Rebellische Pianistin. ISBN 978-3-7957-0800-9 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Grete Sultan is a pianist that I had to discover by chance. And how lucky I was! Grete Sultan had embarked on a promising career in Germany as a pianist and teacher in the 20s and 30s. The audience loved her for her sensitive, unadorned style, for her thoroughly intellectual approach to works from the Baroque and the Vienna classic era. It all came to a provisional halt with the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the persecution of Germany’s Jewish citizens. For Grete Sultan was a German and a Jew. She stayed in Berlin until 1941, allowed to perform only in front of a Jewish audience and witnessing the expropriation and looting, the deportation and murder of friends. She escaped to the United States on the last ship with Jewish refugees from Germany.

In New York she started to rebuilt her career and she benefited from a wise and courageous decision she had made decades earlier in Berlin. While she excelled in the performance of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, she was interested in contemporary works right from the beginning of her career. She had compositions by Arnold Schönberg and Aaron Copland in her repertoire, and this made it possible to connect to the New York network of avant-garde US composers. John Cage became a lifelong friend (and chess partner), she became his muse. While works from the Baroque – Bach’s Goldberg Variations – and Grete Sultan’s acclaimed performance of these were the entry ticket to the US concert business, the study of contemporary classical music rewarded her with a social environment that gave her the strenght to take up a female pianist’s career against all odds.

Von Bredow retraces in this thrilling biography the life of an exceptional woman whose one and only raison d’être was the piano. If German and US composers figured prominently on her concert programs, Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade No. 2 in F major, one of my favourites, propably is the piece she has played most, chiefly during her Berlin years:

Time to say good-bye with Chopin

Faith, love, hope

Dietrich Korsch (Hrsg.): Martin Luther. Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen. ISBN 978-3-374-04259-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Martin Luther’s essay “A Treatise on Christian Liberty” is a fundamental text defining the basics of the Protestant creed, and the editor and commentator Dietrich Korsch does an excellent job in explaining the historical context and in showing the text’s relevance for Protestants’ daily search for God in modern times. Faith as the finality and the essence of the believer’s life, the complementarity of absolute faith and the observance of God’s commandements, the challenge and the impossibility to live according to God’s ideal, the hope for redemption for Man’s failure to live up to God’s expectation – those are the subjects covered by Luther.

Luther wrote a deeply impressive treatise, well argued, well written, short and to the point. I am not surprised that its stringent logic and its legitimation through the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles did unsettle many in the Papal States. They quickly realised that Luther’s creed would challenge the Pope’s worldly power and the wealth of the Catholic church.

It took some time until I renewed my effort to understand Christian faith, and music had much to do with. Listening to Anton Bruckner’s Mass No. 1 triggered the idea to take up this book, while the writing itself was inspired by William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices:

A moment of peace in times of strife and misery

Sailing with the Vikings, Magellan and Black Beard

Olivier & Patrick Poivre d’Arvor: L’odyssée des marins ISBN 9-78221-116760 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This book is a treasure trove! Two brothers from Brittany, both in love with all things connected to ships, travel the world to research the life and deeds of navigators, explorers, treasure hunters, colonists, pirates, corsairs, famous admirals and sailing champions. An exhaustive study, extremely well written, a book that reactivated many a childhood dream of mine sailing the oceans and diving for sunken ships ladden with gold and rubies.

The longing for exotic worlds, a long sea voyage and the discovery of new realms leads me to a famous composing naval officer: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. He wrote a wonderful symphonic poem callled “Sheherazade”:

Sailing with Sindbad the Seafarer

Pina Bausch – From rejection to fame

Anne Linsel: Pina Bausch. Bilder eines Lebens. ISBN 978-3-8419-0182-8 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I once was acquainted with a dancer and she venerated Pina Bausch, a German dancer and choreographer that revolutionized modern dance. She created the genre Tanztheater (dance theatre) and moved from initial rejection in the 70s to worldwide fame culminating in the Kyoto Award. Anne Linsel has traced a very nice and exciting portrait and retrieved many wonderful pictures from the archives of this exceptional person.

While reading this book I had to think about Toru Takemitsu, a Japanese composer. Pina Bausch’s life and her ideas about dance and theatre inspired me to a post on Takemitsu that will be published in a couple of weeks. However, there is a revolutionary piece from Takemitsu that fits extremely well: Corona – Crossing. And I have written about it:

Floating like dust – the sound of transcendence

When art becomes a political tool

Volker Reinhardt: Die Medici. Florenz im Zeitalter im Zeitalter der Renaissance. ISBN 978-3-406-44028-1 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Composing music during the Renaissance and later during the Baroque era was unthinkable without a reliable network of patrons. Kings and queens, princes, the Vatican and its wealthy representatives – those were the people composers were looking for. However, in northern Italy the political situation favoured the rising of wealthy banker and merchant families, the Medici being one of the most famous examples. Reinhardt traces a fascinating portrait of the three generations that built the wealth and fame of that Florentine family and highlights how the Medicis’ patronage of arts became one of their political tools to expand and stabilize their influence. The book is well researched, at times a little cumbersome to read – German syntax can become a weapon of mass confusion if in the wrong hands. My overall experience however was a joyful one. I learned a lot – my greatest compliment to any author.

Emilio di Cavalieri, a Renaissance composer, wrote a wonderful piece narrating the eternal conflict of the human soul: virtue or pleasure? Duty or fun? Ascetism or opulence? In the light of the ascendance of a non-aristocratic family the Medici to unprecedented wealth and might, Cavalieri’s “Rappresentatione di anima, et di corpo” is the appropriate critical judgment of the spirit of the Renaissance:

Searching for the salvation of the soul