Entertaining...opinionated...absolutely great read.

books:


	• The Lives of the Great Composers Harold C. Schonberg W. W. Norton & Company, 1997 - 653 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Indispensible

This is one of the most useful and well written non-fiction books I've ever read. Schonberg writes authoritatively and with great eloquence, though it is easily understandable to the lay person. What I love so much about this volume is that, while by no means comprehensive, it weaves a brilliant timeline, placing each composer in his social and geographical place like the pieces of a great puzzle. The book is worth the pricetag alone for the brilliant anecdotes. Schonberg really downplays the technical side of the music, opting instead for a general overview of the composer's major works. Anyone who reads this volume will have a greater understanding of Classical music and its composers in a very general sense. It is a fantastic overview, very easy to read, and full of wit and charm. Highly recommended.

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An excellent reference, and interesting reading

I was first introduced to this book after picking it up at the local library on Audio CD. After listening, I was thrilled to find a used copy at the local used bookstore, and picked it up for my own resource library.

This book provides an intimate and chronologically logical look into the lives of many of the most well-known composers. My only gripe about this book is that there is virtually nothing on Benjamin Britten, my favorite composer. Of course, that might be due, in part, to the fact that Britten was still living at the time of the writing of this book, and would not likely have been looked at as one of the "masters" at that time.

For history buffs, as well as musicians and music students, I highly recommend this book as a great resource for information past the dull facts provided in most music history books.

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A Limited View of Music History

There are a number of books aimed at a general audience which chronicle the lives of the great composers of western classical music. One of the best known is THE LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS by the late New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg. The 21st-century reader who peruses this book will get some engaging takes on composers of the common practice period. He will also get a glimpse into some outmoded attitudes towards music. Even with its updates since the first edition of 1970, the book shows biases and blind spots common to its author's generation. These biases can be reduced to two factors: a blindness to early music, and a repertoire-centered mind-set.

Can anyone imagine a history of painting that begins with, say, Rembrandt and ignores everything that came before? This is similar to what Schonberg does. His is a view of music history centered on the nineteenth century. The pre-Bach period is only lightly sketched in, while he devotes pages upon pages to all manner of romantic composers. Schonberg attempts to justify his non-inclusion of earlier composers: "Their work is simply not heard, by and large, in concert halls around the world...audiences tend to find the music archaic, or lacking in personality, or just plain dull". Schonberg's decision to add a chapter on Monteverdi for the 1996 edition is laudable, but there is still no accounting for the hundred-year gap between Monteverdi and Bach - were there no great creators, no strong personalities, in that period? As a result of this neglect, the reader gets no sense of Bach's roots in the German baroque tradition of Biber, Buxtehude, Schuetz, etc; to read Chapter Two, "The Transfiguration of the Baroque", one would think that Bach's achievements came from nowhere. In addition to this time gap, there are examples of clumsy editing where Schonberg simply cut and pasted in some new text for the revised edition but the new text does not make sense with the older text around it (for example, the ending of the chapter on Handel). And I will not go into Schonberg's one-sided and inaccurate account of the equal temperament system of tuning, just another example of the outmoded attitudes found in this book.

Some illuminating quotes about baroque music come in the final chapter of the book - paradoxically, in a discussion on trends in contemporary music. In dubbing minimalist music "New Baroque" because of its use of repeated patterns, Schonberg shows a colossal ignorance of what the baroque aesthetic means. In the same paragraph we get this gem: "Part of the attraction of Baroque music was that one did not have to think while listening to it. Its excuse for being was that it wrapped the listener in innocuous sound, the busy patterns moving up and down without really ever saying anything." Of course, what Schonberg is describing here is not "Baroque music"; it is the Italian late baroque instrumental music of composers like Vivaldi. To give the impression that facile, formulaic compositions are characteristic of baroque music as a whole (or are limited to the baroque period, for that matter) is absurd. Moreover, this comment is emblematic of the common mentality of Schonberg's generation that confused the late baroque with the entire baroque era and relegated the composers before Bach to the status of primitives who paved the way for the "real masters". Yet Schonberg shows that he is at least partially aware of earlier music. He gives nods towards Purcell and others. How about entire chapters devoted to them?

The second problem with the book is that it has a concert-hall, repertoire-centered view of music. Whether a composer is in the active repertoire or not an inordinately important yardstick for Schonberg. He uses it as an excuse to dismiss an important 20th-century creator such as Arthur Honegger in a few curt sentences: "[O]n the whole Honegger has slid from his once-high position, and his music is vanishing fast from the concert halls". Meanwhile, in a transparent P.C. gesture, such a peripheral figure as Dame Ethel Smyth merits two rather detailed paragraphs and even a photo.

To be sure, the book has its good points. Schonberg's writing is lively and often delightful. His views on composers like Chabrier and Vaughan Williams are illuminating and refreshing. And his focus on repertoire impels him to give an interesting chronicle of changing tastes and critical receptions of various composers. But ultimately the cons outweigh the pros. This may have to do with the book's genre itself: I don't think the "lives of the great composers" approach is a good way to learn about music history. It forces you to focus on personalities instead of the whole richness of musical development. The layman who wants a good introduction to music history should look to a book such as Jan Swafford's VINTAGE GUIDE TO CLASSICAL MUSIC, which wraps a traditional "lives of the composers" with discussions of style, theory, and performance practice, rather than Harold Schonberg's antiquated and irrelevant LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS.

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Great Book

This is one of my favorite books. It's a great 'chapter a day' book. Great writing, and entertaining anecdotes.

Entertaining...opinionated...absolutely great read.

For two years this was the only book on classical music that I read...

If you can forgive Mr Schonberg for some unfairness towards Mahler and Sibelius, then you will enjoy this book for the: wonderful narration, the jibes (In the intro: "did they think I was mongolian?"), and the strong opinions.

My problems with Mr. Schonberg's book: he condenses some composers into one chapter (Bruckner, Mahler, Reger) after doing a seperate chapter for Hugo Wolf! I felt that Dvorak deserved a chpater unto himself, as did Sibelius.

Ah well, all in all that is no reason to dismiss this good book.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

An updated and expanded edition of this perennial favorite, tracing the line of composers from Monteverdi to the tonalists of the 1990s. In this new edition, Harold Schonberg offers music lovers a series of fascinating biographical chapters. Music, the author contends, is a continually evolving art, and all geniuses, unique as they are, were influenced by their predecessors. Schonberg discusses the lives and works of the foremost figures in classical music, among them Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, the Schumanns, Copland, and Stravinsky, weaving a fabric rich in detail and anecdote. He also includes the creators of light music, such as Gilbert and Sullivan and the Strausses. Schonberg has extended the volume's coverage to provide informative and clearly written descriptions of the later serialists such as Stockhausen and Carter, the iconoclastic John Cage, the individualistic Messiaen, minimalist composers, the new tonalists, and women composers of all eras, including Mendelssohn Hensel, Chaminade, Smyth, Beach, and Zwilich. Scattered throughout are many changes and additions reflecting musicological findings of the past fifteen years.

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