Books like Absent Friend

Paganini is not one of the composers the author discusses. However, I consider Secret Lives an important book, simply because it “spills the beans” about a number of these giants.

Gioachino Rossini is portrayed with some of his numerous shortcomings (though Paganini’s dalliances achieved far more notoriety). I shall mention a few significant historical facts: (1) he and Paganini were very close friends, (2) Paganini wrote a set of brilliant variations, I Palpiti, based on an aria from Rossini’s opera, Tancredi, and (3) Paganini did indeed conduct the debut of another Rossini opera, Matilde di Shobran.

Secret Lives was also a source I tapped for some of the information I presented about composers (including, most notably, Richard Wagner) in one of my own novels.

Penrod reminded the composer of the many adventures he had as a young boy along with his friends in the early decades of the 20th century. 

McKay remembered when he helped the son of a doctor who was a boyhood friend as they made placebos for the doctor's practice out of bread and water in the basement of the doctor's home. He also recalled street fights with other boys that did not always turn out well for undersized kids but were considered sporting in those times in frontier towns.

This is without doubt the greatest Mozart biography of the twentieth century, building directly on the foundation of the nineteenth century’s most important biography (by Otto Jahn). 

Abert’s momentous work, exhaustive, incisive, well informed and opinionated in turn, is expertly translated and edited in this eminently readable volume.      

This thoroughly researched and engaging biography starts before the beginning of Mozart’s life and ends long after it. In short–and as indicated in the book’s subtitle–it is not simply about Mozart, but about how his life intersects with the lives of those closest to him, namely father Leopold, sister Nannerl, and wife Constanze. 

Leopold emerges as central to Mozart’s story until his death in 1787, and Constanze too from their courtship in 1781, through Mozart’s death a decade later and beyond it as well, when she tirelessly developed his legacy and reputation.   

Bernard Herrmann is revered as one of the movies' greatest composers.

Imagine starting your Hollywood career with music for Citizen Kane!

He enjoyed a very productive 10-year relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock, which produced such masterpieces as Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest; he also worked with Francois Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, composed the original Twilight Zone theme, and capped his career with music for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Yet he could be cantankerous and difficult, antagonizing both friends and colleagues with his temperamental behavior and insistence upon the highest standards of music and drama.

I love the fact that Smith writes as well about the music as he does about the composer, and the reader walks away knowing lots about both.

George Gershwin is brought to life as we read this book. Prior to Rhapsody in Blue being played by our hometown orchestra, I took the liberty of paraphrasing this entire book and showing pictures on the big screen, which engaged the audience. They truly loved it! 

Suzanne Slade has a delightful way of expressing the feelings of George. He heard music in everything. Perhaps we could take a lesson from George and pay more attention to our surroundings. George heard music while roller skating down the street. He heard melodies in the clatter and noise of New York’s bustling street. What new and exciting adventure will you discover if you only STOP, Look Around, and LISTEN?

This is the first substantial biography of Mozart, published in 1798. It was written by a Czech author, Franz Niemetschek, who probably knew Mozart personally and who certainly attended musical events at which Mozart participated in Prague in 1787 and 1791. 

While its tone is hagiographical, it contains important insights on Mozartian aesthetics, as well as invaluable recollections of Mozart in action.    

This book helped me understand the lives of young male jazz musicians in the early 20th century. A wacky, ecstatic, fragmented, kaleidoscopic, memoir—nostalgic always for Bloomington, Indiana, and his college days in the early 1920s. There Carmichael met his pals Monk and Bix, both of whom died too young. He dedicates the book to them and remembers them fondly. Monk, a surrealistic poet, and Bix, a great musical genius, they understood each other immediately. Bix responded to one of Monk’s poems saying, “I am not a swan.” There is a Dadaist flavor to Monk’s writing, as well as some of Hoagy’s: “The years had pants.” Intertwined with these memories is the slow, jerky progress of Carmichael’s journey from a would-be composer to a famous songwriter.

This book encourages readers to travel through the ages with our most famous classical composers, big bands, jazz, and popular music innovators. It introduces the reader to time periods beginning with primitive man and ending with the Beatles arriving at Buckingham Palace to receive honors from the Queen of England. Tidbits of information are gleaned as one progresses from page to page through the periods.

Piero Ventura’s fascinating art helps us visualize everyday life and gain insight into our most famous composers. One can almost see the composers walking the streets, attending opening night concerts, operas, and ballets while showing us they were real people, just like us. One never knows what influence these great composers or any one of us might have on society from generation to generation.

The Manchester evoked by Joy Division and Barry Adamson's first band, Magazine, also entered the Eighties a ravaged post-industrial city, strafed first by the Luftwaffe and then its own planners, who erected Brutalist estates over its Victorian past.

The son of a white Mancunian mother and black Jamaican father, Adamson grew up in some of the worst of the city's social housing in the Hulme of the Sixties. Another Selby aficionado, Barry recounts the story his challenging childhood with a picaresque, magical realist flair.

Music offers both salvation and damnation – as he progresses through Magazine and into Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, so too do all his most self-sabotaging addictions, until death brings a reckoning and a salvation in the first fruit of his solo career, the LP Moss Side Story.