Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works (Eastman Studies in Music) Review

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(More customer reviews)Songs are my favorite classical genre. Schoeck wrote little else. I've been curious about him for decades. I even bought this very book in German, just to commune with it.
Now, here it is in its American-born author's original English - with much updating of fact and and new analysis.
I had had no idea what kind of person the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck was. Not everything I've learned is pleasing, but even so it's good to know.
Chris Walton devotes one chapter to my favorite Schoeck work, the Sommernacht for string orchestra.
The book should satisfy any Schoeck-lover and will edify anyone interested in the influence of Nazism on the arts, in lieder, or in German culture.

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The work of the late-Romantic Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) has in recent years enjoyed a surge of interest. His 300 songs with piano accompaniment are now all on CD, as are his orchestral song cycles and five of his eight stage works. Yet despite an impressive discography featuring names such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Lucia Popp and Ian Bostridge, no biographical study of Schoeck has ever been available in English. Chris Walton, author of Richard Wagner in Zurich: The Muse of Place, charts the turbulent course of Schoeck's life and career with care and candor, from a rampant youth to midlife monogamy and an old age ravaged by fears of neglect. He traces Schoeck's relationships to musicians such as Max Reger, Ferruccio Busoni, Wilhelm FurtwÃ¤ngler, Paul Hindemith, and Igor Stravinsky, and to writers Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and James Joyce. New light is also shed on Schoeck's uneasy relationship with Nazi Germany and its culmination, for him, in public humiliation and private catastrophe. As an accompanist, Schoeck was an arch-Romantic master of rubato; as a conductor, he was a fervent champion of the new; and in his compositions, he moved from late-Romanticism through a modernist vortex to emerge in full mastery of an individual musical language both sensuous and stringent. In this thorough new biography, Walton places Schoeck the man and the artist squarely in the context of his time. Chris Walton is extraordinary professor at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and managing director of the Orchestre Symphonique Bienne in Switzerland.