An exceptional biography about an exceptional young Czech composer. Gideon Klein was much more than the tragic young man murdered before his prime as David Fligg’s excellent biography explains.
On cue, just as the conference in Vienna ‘Im Anschluss’ begins, (see the article on the conference elsewhere on this page), a review of ‘Forbidden Music’ appears in a German publication that highlights… Continue reading
It’s still early days and I always feel slightly amazed when I’m forwarded a review by someone who has actually read the book rather than just the opening and last chapters with a… Continue reading
I’m sure many readers here also follow Norman Lebrecht – if not, he offers on his daily news-digest a fascinating audio clip that should not get lost. It is Deryck Cooke explaining his… Continue reading
Those living in the UK may have listened to the BBC’s week-long broadcast on Radio 3 of film composers. I have to admit that I only caught a couple of the programmes. To… Continue reading
It’s always a relief when people write positively about ‘Forbidden Music’. It’s still early days I’m told, and it can take up to two years for reviews to filter through. Slowly, they have… Continue reading
In a perverse way, there is possibly no better means of trying to get our 21st century heads around anti-Semitism than looking through a collection of anti-Semitic postcards. This was quite a popular… Continue reading
One of Korngold’s more puzzling confections is his opera ‘die Kathrin’. If one looks at the timeline of its composition, it comes exactly ten years after his previous opera ‘Das Wunder der Heliane’… Continue reading
Edmund Eysler and Leo Fall are two operetta composers who along with Oscar Straus and Leo Ascher seemed to have vanished entirely from the repertoire. Whether this is the nature of operetta, which… Continue reading
Viktor Zuckerkandl makes a return to this page with his critique of the ‘Zeitoper’, a concept that has no English equivalent but was used to convey a genre of opera that offered the… Continue reading
