Beskrivelse
Had Bruno Walter not been one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, he would have been a great writer. Even in the english translation his prose sears images and emotions into your soul. The book is above all about music and a life ennobled by music. But it is also a vivid description of the way the lights went out in Europe with the rise of ideology, fanaticism and racial prejudice. Walter describes , in fact, the death of Europe’s soul. There are truly extraordinary moments in what is always a memorable book: The pages devoted to Mahler, the distinction he draws between playing and understanding Mozart, the description of how his orchestra smuggled him out of Berlin as the Gestapo waited for the end of his encores to arrest him. But the most poignant moment is his meeting on a beach in California with Thomas Mann, similarly exiled because he had a Jewish wife. Two people who epitomised all that Europe had struggled for a millennium to create – now stranded and homesick in a young and still uncouth land.
