The magnificent singer Ian Bostridge wrote a thoughtful, in-depth book about ‘Winterreise’. My friend Steven Isserlis, a musician-musician, wrote an essential addition to the Bach Cello Suites. We should be grateful to Anne Midgette for sitting with Leon Fleisher and recording his life and musical insights, and there are recent memoirs by the great pianists Andras Schiff, Stephen Hough and Alfred Brendel. They wish Mitsuko Uchida to write something!
Personally, I am currently deeply rereading and reflecting on Susan McClary’s great, controversial work of feminist musicology: “Feminine Endings.” She takes no prisoners, dismantles the cloaks of Western classical stories and places sex back in the often stale realm of musicology.
Do you count books as guilty pleasures?
As the son of an expired monk, all my pleasures are due.
Has a book ever brought you closer to someone else, or come between you?
I often talked about books with my late friend, the composer Michael Friedman. I told him I loved Franzen’s ‘The Corrections’. The book sawed into my soul. It was the novel-length diatribe I would have composed about my family if I hadn’t been so busy practicing the piano! But then “Freedom” came out – and God, I hated it, with a wide passion. For months, every time I saw Michael, I started all over again about how disappointing it was. Michael defended Franzen, softly and then sharply. One night, in a speakeasy in the West Village, he had had enough. He yelled across the table, “Not again with ‘Freedom’!” The maître d’ looked up startled. In a calmer, more urgent tone, Michael added that I needed therapy because my obsessive harp playing made me even more annoying than Jonathan Franzen’s characters. That kept me quiet.
After my father was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at a later age, we also talked about books. It was the only way we could be, if not emotionally, at least emotionally adjacent. He really wanted to know what I liked. I said I was excited to read the latest David Foster Wallace – “The Pale King” – so my dad bought it, and we got into it. A book club of two. A third of the way, I began to realize that I was forcing him to spend his precious time wandering through twisted, self-recursive prose visions of bureaucratic woe that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to finish. So I called and said, “Dad, I’m so sorry!” He sighed with relief.
I suggested “Pnin” instead. God bless him, he dutifully bought it too. A few weeks later he called me. “The dishwashing scene,” he said with a small tremor in his voice, and that was it. This went through my heart. How Pnin drops a long-legged nutcracker into the foamy sink full of glass and hears a mysterious crackle. How does Nabokov manage to make the prosaic act so luminous? We discussed how Pnin replaced the aquamarine glass safe on the shelf, a gift from his estranged stepson, and I realized we were the same in essentials, and yet we would never really connect.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned recently from a book?
Laurence Dreyfus (in his beautiful “Wagner and the Erotic Impulse”) made me aware that Richard Wagner had a fetish for composing in silk lingerie, and he sent Nietzsche out to get him new undergarments. Nietzsche’s vision snooping in the underwear shop!