Summary of Norman Lebrecht's Genius & Anxiety , livre ebook

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47 pages

English

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In 1846, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a composer, came to visit his sister, Fanny, in Berlin. He had a present for her: a proof copy of his new piano trio in C minor, a work of joyous vivacity.
#2 Felix’s relationship with his sister was very close, but he never allowed her to publish any of her songs. He was afraid that her piano works might hurt his reputation.
#3 In 1847, Felix died of a stroke, just like his mother. He had been exhausted from conducting and painting, and his hands had gone numb. He had been conducting six morbid Lieder, opus 71, when his hands lost sensation.
#4 The death of Felix Mendelssohn, at 38, reminds people of Mozart’s at a similar age. His reputation falls like a cemetery angel in a winter storm. Wagner, in his mid-thirties, seizes the opportunity to discredit him and prove his own credentials.

Sujets

Jewish

Histoire

Jews

History

Informations

Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	03 mai 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669398967
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Insights on Norman Lebrecht's Genius Anxiety
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 1846, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a composer, came to visit his sister, Fanny, in Berlin. He had a present for her: a proof copy of his new piano trio in C minor, a work of joyous vivacity.

#2

Felix’s relationship with his sister was very close, but he never allowed her to publish any of her songs. He was afraid that her piano works might hurt his reputation.

#3

In 1847, Felix died of a stroke, just like his mother. He had been exhausted from conducting and painting, and his hands had gone numb. He had been conducting six morbid Lieder, opus 71, when his hands lost sensation.

#4

The death of Felix Mendelssohn, at 38, reminds people of Mozart’s at a similar age. His reputation falls like a cemetery angel in a winter storm. Wagner, in his mid-thirties, seizes the opportunity to discredit him and prove his own credentials.

#5

Heine and Mendelssohn were both Jews, and they did not like each other at all. Heine was a poet, and he did not want to earn his living by poetry. Heine converted to Lutheranism, and then became twice as Jewish when he stopped being a Jew.

#6

Heine’s poems, stage plays, travel journals and screeds of journalism poured forth. He was untroubled by any need for balance or accuracy. He was bigoted, rumbustious, and hypocritical. Heine lived his life from the outside in.

#7

Heine was a poet who wrote about Germany. He used simple nouns and verbs, and reveled in dualities. He liked to play with the words and meanings of sentences. He did not care for composers, as a breed, and they used his poems without payment.

#8

Heine was extremely critical of Felix Mendelssohn, and he hated him for misusing his God-given talents to serve the Church. He felt that Mendelssohn was the anti-Heine, and he could not put him out of his mind.

#9

Karl Marx was a German philosopher who developed an ideology based on the ideas of German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He met Heine by chance in a newspaper office, and he was determined to make a Marxist of Heine.

#10

Before he can get to work on Engels’s research, Marx has to write two essays. The first is a review of a paper by Bruno Bauer, a student of Hegel’s who argues that Jews should not have equal rights. The second is a essay titled On The Jewish Question, which argues that Jews should not have equal rights because their religious practices and separations promote a Jewish tendency to materialism.

#11

Isaiah Berlin, in his book on Marx, first published in 1939, ignores the anti-Jewish content of the essay. He argues that Marx was trying to redeem Jews and Christians alike from God. But Marx still believed that Judaism was a personal stigma.

#12

Heine’s poems had a huge impact on Marx, and he eventually converted to communism. While Engels gave Marx hard economic facts, Heine showed him how to write a headline.

#13

The leader of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, was a very unpolitical man. He had a flutter on the Stock Exchange, and sent despatches to the New York Daily Tribune. His family legacy allows him to move to Kentish Town in 1856, where he becomes a bourgeois.

#14

Disraeli was a prime example of a politician with a sharp tongue. He was a novelist, and his three novels, Coningsby, Sibyl, and Tancred, captured the disaffection of young Tories. He was unable to bring down the government with a page-turner, so he waited until the Corn Law was read and brought down the government with that.

#15

The first Jew to be elected to parliament was Lionel de Rothschild, who was elected in 1858. He never made a speech or took any part in political life, and he was not grateful to Disraeli.

#16

The Jews are a major reason why Disraeli supports the Jew Bill. He sees them as entrepreneurial, restless, quizzical, cultured, philanthropic, productive, contentious, and colorful. He backs the Jew Bill because it is good for England.

#17

Felix Mendelssohn’s name has an emotive context. It is a reference to God’s promise to comfort the mourners of Zion. His letters are littered with clues. He was a great German composer, but he was also a symbol of the German geist.

#18

The first encounter I had with a Jewish theme in Mendelssohn’s music was at a concert of the Reformation Symphony in 1994. The music was stopped stone-dead by a klezmer clarinet wail in the eighth episode, titled funeral march.

#19

Being Jewish does not make Mendelssohn a genius. His gifts are unique and particular, and he is acutely aware of what others might call the indignity of his difference. However, knowing that his difference cannot be erased gives him the freedom to express an idea without being inhibited by fear of criticism or the need to please those in power.

#20

The turning points in the lives of Heine, Marx, and Disraeli in 1847 set the tone for a century of Jewish invention. They were all iconoclasts, and they all had a religious impulse known as tikun olam, which was the desire to change the world.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The rabbi, named Samson, was offered a job in Frankfurt by a group of Jewish men who had resigned from Reform-run institutions. He was sacrificing his career and putting his children’s future at risk.

#2

Hirsch was the first rabbi to draw on the philosophy of Maimonides, who taught that Judaism had been revitalised down the ages by contact with other cultures. He declared war on the Reform Temple through the medieval act of blowing the black shofar, which marks an act of excommunication.

#3

The Nineteen Letters, published in 1836, was the first book to galvanize German Jews on both sides of the rising barricade. It was written by Hirsch, a young man who had lost his faith at a pre-Yom Kippur ceremony, and who re-found it after reading the book.

#4

Hirsch was the first rabbi to rebuild a Jewish establishment in Frankfurt, and he did so completely without Christian help. He taught his students modern science, and the Talmud was not treated as a remedy for pain relief.

#5

The French pianist Charles-Valentin Alkan disappeared in 1851. He had his reasons, and he had done this sort of thing before. He was a phenomenon, a pianist without rival and a composer of wild invention. He had disappeared for five years between 1839 and 1844, when he began teaching his son to play the piano.

#6

Alkan was a famous pianist in Paris during the mid nineteenth century. He wrote music, and also translated the Bible into French. He was the last of the golden age keyboard artists, only faster than Chopin or Liszt.

#7

Alkan’s music is extremely difficult to play, and it takes a lot of skill and single-minded determination to conquer it. It was not until the age of John Cage and Pierre Boulez that his sonorities were heard again.

#8

The author meets with Ronald Smith, a Busoni expert, who makes the composer his life’s mission. Smith writes a two-volume biography and fills the Royal Festival Hall with Alkan lecture-recitals. Alkan is proud to be Jewish.

#9

The first synagogue to employ a female cantor was built in California by Levi Strauss, a Bavarian clothier. When General Ulysses S Grant threatened to expel Jews from territory under his control, he got a reminder from Jesse Seligman that his family had once extended him credit when he was a penniless lieutenant.

#10

The most flamboyant New York Jew is August Belmont, national chairman of the Democratic Party and the Rothschilds’ man in America. He is a illegitimate son of the Rothschilds.

#11

The post of chief rabbi of France fell vacant in 1866. Salomon Wolf Klein seemed likely to win election, until Reformers joined forces with a feeble Orthodox minister to defeat him. In Colmar, Klein started a rabbinical college with the aim of filling France with rabbis in his own symbiotic mode.