These are books about music I've read and re-read in the last year, for one or another reason.
Alan Walker-
Franz Liszt. Volume 2- the Weimar Years: 1848-1861. The second volume (bought cheap *g*) of a major three-volume biography of a major 19th-century composer, taking in his music, his life, his students, his musical and literary contemporaries, his times. Apparently well-researched; there are some points on which the author had, or claims to have had, access to currently otherwise-inaccessible sources - on the question of the success or failure of Liszt's mistress, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein's annulment, and exactly what happened when she went to plead her case in Rome, say - and so, until those sources are opened up to more people, his research on those subjects isn't verifiable.
Alfred Einstein (distant cousin to Albert, apparently, yes)-
Mozart: his Character, his Work. Not so much a biography, this time- assumes one knows the basic biographical facts about Wolfgang- but goes through the music as it was known ca 1947 (when the first version of the book came out), shows developments within the music of a composer whose music was (still is??) considered too often as basically unchanging from his earliest to his last pieces, also tries for an overview of the musical situation of the period and characterizes Mozart well, I think, as a "revolutionary conservative"- with no intention to
break the bounds of the traditions he had, but making the most of them and putting everything he had to the most musical of uses. Some very perceptive comments on individual works, too...
Also about Mozart: (1948, revised 1958, republished by Dover Publications in 1962) "Mozart and his Piano Concertos" by Cuthbert Morton Girdlestone. When first written, there were many fewer recordings of the piano concertos (Mozart's best works, on the whole, that don't use the human voice, in my opinion) than there are now, and many fewer performances generally (now a season of the New York Philharmonic or in another large city will probably include at least one, and not necessarily the 20th or 26th, which were the only ones known at one point, either. Actually, on a quick websearch, I see that the 10th concerto- for 2 pianos and orchestra- was performed just a month or so ago in New York, and the 12th was
played back in May in rehearsal if not in concert, along with some Hindemith... of course, this is the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, and more performances than usual is not unexpected.)
Anyhow, Girdlestone's book I recommend for many of the same reasons as Einstein's- perceptive comments on the concertos, linking them with other works in the composer's output, thoughts about myths that have grown up about individual work (the 18th concerto has been called the Paradis concerto because of a line in one of Leopold Mozart's - Mozart's father's- letters, but there may not be good evidence just what concerto was referred to, nor that the pianist did take the concerto to Paris as Leopold wrote) ...
Two collections by Arnold Schoenberg also, but they can wait until another blog really...
