Fritz Kreisler: Love's Sorrow, Love's Joy

Kreisler (1875-1962) is probably better known today as the composer of a handful of ineffably charming little violin pieces than as the towering virtuoso he was in the first half of the century. The emerging recording industry made him one of the most admired and popular violinists of his day and, until a nearly fatal street accident in 1941 that began his gradual decline, colleagues and public alike thought his golden tone and liquid phrasing supreme. Biancolli's biography, the first since the standard by Kreisler's friend Louis Lochner, is a notably sympathetic and well-researched one--and it has the inestimable advantage that Kreisler's wife, the domineering Harriet, who had absolute veto power over Lochner's book, is no longer around. Many people therefore have their say about her, concluding that though she indeed made life difficult for the charming but essentially lazy and diffident Kreisler, she did keep his career firmly in order. Kreisler was a legendary figure, representative of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: he tried, unsuccessfully, for an early virtuoso career, served as an Austrian officer during WWI, and, though he was at least half-Jewish, he presented himself as a lapsed Catholic. Biancolli, music critic for the Albany Times Union, has done a scrupulous job of examining the reality and many legends around him and also his impact. Although he was eventually eclipsed by the cold perfectionism of Jascha Heifetz, who became the chief influence on the current generation of violinists, there were many, like Nathan Milstein, Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh for whom Kreisler represented, as Isaac Stern wrote, ""the unashamed enjoyment of being moved by the music."" Pictures, discography. (Sept.)