![]() Strauss comes off rather badly in his account Orff rather better: Carmina Burana was dismissed with an offensively racist epithet by a Nazi reviewer when it first appeared, though when it became popular the Nazi aesthetic was modified to accommodate that fact. He says quite a lot about Strauss, Schoenberg, Messiaen and the minimalists, little about Ravel, nothing about William Schuman, a bare mention of Rochberg, a line about Shapero (his early interest in jazz, not his symphony). To be sure, it would be impossible to do justice to all the significant composers of the past century, even in such a lengthy book. He tends to focus on representative figures from various times and places, whom he makes vivid and real, rather than give balanced accounts of other composers. To this end he devotes chapters to Berlin in the 20s, music in Stalin's Russia, FDR's U.S. His stated aim is to give an account of the "cultural predicament of the composer in the twentieth century," and thus the social and political conditions in which composers lived. Beginning with a performance of Salome, in Graz, the attendees of which included Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Puccini, and perhaps Hitler, he brings his historical account up to John Adams. Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, presents a highly researched and documented history of 20 th century classical music. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |