Pleasures of Music: An Anthology of Writing about Music and Musicians from Cellini to Bernard Shaw

PLEASURES OF MUSIC is anything but the type of book that a high school freshman might be expected to study in a music appreciation course. Instead, it is a delightful anthology of fiction, criticism, biography, correspondence, and a half dozen other categories, all having music as their themes. One needs to know very little about music, and nothing about the technical aspects of music, to thoroughly enjoy this book. It does help to be culturally literate and to have at least a passing familiarty with such writers as Dickens, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Balzac, and Shaw, and to know who Mozart, Beethoven, and the other giants of music are. It helps, but even this level of familiarity is not necessary to enjoy the interesting and entertaining writing presented here.One of the most entertaining fictional pieces is a segment from Dickens' MARTIN CHUZZELWIT in which a drunken serenade of farewell is performed on a stairwell in the wee hours of the night. The following conveys the feel of this serenade and of the writing: "The youngest gentleman blew his melanchology into a flute. He didn't blow much out of it, but that was all the better." One need not be a music aficionado to enjoy writing like that, and there is much more.In the section of criticism, I particularly enjoyed Heinrich Heine's musings on the nature of music. He says that "music is a miracle. . . . It stands halfway between thought and phenomenom, between spirit and matter." In this same article, Heine is particularly critical of French Opera, saying that the then current French Composers such as Berlioz and Liszt had practically deserted music in favor of spectacle. Here is part of his physical description of Berlioz: "He has had his monstrous, antediluvian head of hair cut off; it used to bristle upon his brow like a forest on a craggy cliff." At times Heine's sarcasm is much more subdued and has to be read twice to be assured that it is actually sarcasm.In the section entitled "The Musical Life," there are segments by writers as diverse as P. T. Barnum, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens. The section of "Fantasies and Confessions" has works by Lamb, Rossini, and Swift, among others. PLEASURES OF MUSIC concludes with correspondence from Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Brahms and other notables from the field of music.The book is entertaining and contains such a diversity of fiction, criticism, biography, history, and soul baring that there seems, to me, to be something of interest to almost anyone who enjoys reading.