The Steinway Collection: Paintings of Great Composers (Amadeus) [Hardcover] Review

This slim, handsome, coffee-table book containing artistic impressions of 12 great composers with rich explanatory essays is an invitation to indulgence. Famed music critic James Huneker was commissioned by Steinway and Sons to write the texts illuminating the 12 paintings by American artists of famous composers for the pianoforte (and other instruments). The paintings remain on display in the Steinway Collection in Steinway Hall in New York. This flawless edition brings both paintings and essays, containing jewels of truths about the lives of the composers, is an ideal contribution to the study or browsing list of armchair devotees of classical music. It is a long awaited resurrection. The museum quality paintings are dark, looming, mysterious, even overwhelming, florid with imagery pertaining to the composition or composer depicted. Because of the need for reduction and color reproduction, these works of art by artists such as A. I. Keller, N. C. Wyeth, John C. Johansen, and Ernest Blumenschein, to mention a few, are the next best things to standing directly before them at the Stineways and Sons gallery. Their intended scale is monolithic. The essays paired with the painting shine clear and true like a beacon over the last eighty -five years. They are clearly the work of an iconographer. There is such mastery of the descriptive phrase, the rhapsodic experience of epiphanies, such brilliantly faceted mirrorings of the composers' works, all paraded in solemn dignity alongside the magnificent paintings. Truly the collection is a treasure. It remains an archetype of style of music criticism. Perhaps the most familiar portrait is the one of Liszt, painted by John C. Johansen. An elderly sublime performer, "he dreams of his past triumphs; of the three women who filled his life - Caroline St. Criq, Countess d'Agoult and Princess Wittgenstein; of his trials, sorrows and ultimate peace in the arms of Mother Church...The weary wonder worker has, like Prospero, laid down his wand; the wizard Merlin is in the toils of Time. Ring down the curtain, the comedy is ended (p. 14)!" The Steinway Collection, Paintings of Great Composers, with Essays by James Huneker is an enthusiastically recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library collections.

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Product Description:
Music lovers will delight in the beautiful color paintings and eloquent prose portraits in The Steinway Collection: Paintings of Great Composers. Chopin, Wagner, Liszt, Beethoven, Berlioz, Mozart, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Handel, and Schubert are among the composers celebrated in this historic book, which was originally printed in 1919 as an in-house publication of Steinway and Sons but has never before been released to the public. The paintings by esteemed American artists and accompanying essays by the brilliant critic James Gibbons Huneker are intended, in Mr. Huneker's words, to "evoke musical visions; for music is visionary, notwithstanding its primal appeal to the ear." An introduction by acclaimed broadcaster and writer David Dubal, Juilliard professor of piano literature, gives the book historical perspective.

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