The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide

Seventeen classical composers are celebrated in these insightful critical essays. A concert pianist and New York Times classical music critic, Tommasini (Virgil Thompson: Composer in the Aisle) expands on a series of his newspaper articles to present a roster of favorites, including Renaissance pioneer Monteverdi; repertory pillars Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert; opera auteurs Verdi and Puccini; and the high modernist Schoenberg, whose atonal music he loves. Tommasini twines engaging biographical sketches of the maestros and their tragic ailments, love affairs, and endless scrambles for money with appreciations of masterpieces, the latter enriched by his memories of hearing and performing them. The portraits merge into a metanarrative about the emergence of the classical tonal language of comprehensible keys and lucid harmonies and its decay (or liberation) into unmoored dissonance. Tommasini’s interpretations sometimes overreach—he detects a “gay sensibility” (as have other critics) in the music of Schubert, because “seemingly happy passages contain disquieting subliminal elements”—but he excels at the difficult task of capturing music in words. “[A] gnarly, slow theme, like the grim song of a Slavic bass” with “hulking, weighty, strange intervals and chords” nails Chopin’s Prelude No. 2. The result is an engrossing study that will appeal to both classical music aficionados and novice listeners who want a road map. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. [em](Nov.) [/em]