The Listener's Companion: Great Composers and Their Works

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, but Poorly Edited
Review: Sometimes when a great composer or writer dies his followers and heirs bring out some of his unfinished or lesser works. Such is the case here. Slonimsky, whose 'Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians' and 'Music since 1900' should be on every musiclover's shelves, was a musical polymath who spent most of his career as a musicologist and writer on music. When he died at over 100 years of age in 1995 his manuscripts were given to the Library of Congress where they remain more or less uncatalogued. His daughter, Electra Slonimsky Yourke, with some others, went through boxes and boxes of his things in order to rescue and bring to light some of his occasional writings about composers and their works. She assembled this collection under the title 'The Listener's Companion' and it was published in 2002. She says in her foreword that there were often several essays bearing on the same composer or work because Slonimsky, among other things, wrote program notes for orchestras, liner notes for recordings and so on. Consequently some of the pieces presented here are actually cobbled together from several articles. Hence one of the problems with the book. There are numbers of repetitions, often within the same article. For instance, here are two sentences from the article on Sergei Prokofiev: 'Prokofiev decided to play his own [first] piano concerto for the commencement exercises at the conservatory,' and, three paragraphs later, 'In 1914, he played his First Piano Concerto as a graduation piece at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.' [Slonimsky, a compulsive editor and fact-checker, would be horrified.] This carelessness is mildly irritating but it does not detract too severely from what is otherwise typically interesting Slonimskian prose. I've collected much of what he wrote not only for the information contained but also for the sheer joy of his style. There was, concealed behind his scholarly façade, an imp of equal importance, and that makes reading him a constant delight; one never knows what will pop up and make one chuckle. Another aspect of his style was the use of unusual words--he had a incomparable command of English although it was not his first language. Where else would you, in an otherwise straightforward passage about the second movement of Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, encounter 'the gemmation of the austere melody and its florification are remarkable'? I don't know about you, but that tickles me; Slonimsky is playing with language the way a kitten plays with a ball of yarn. As Ms Yourke suggests in her foreword, it pays to read Slonimsky with a dictionary at hand.

The book is organized by composer, in chronological order thus: Bach - Handel - Haydn - Mozart - Beethoven - Mendelssohn - Wagner - Brahms - Tchaikovsky - Rimsky-Korsakov - Mahler - Debussy - R. Strauss - Schoenberg - Ravel - Bartók - Stravinsky - Prokofiev - Shostakovich. There is an introductory essay about each composer and then individual essays about some of their works. As you can see, the book is not all-inclusive and, indeed, under each composer there are major omissions. For instance, Beethoven's 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th symphonies do not rate an entry. One reason for this, of course, is the source of the essays--an uncatalogued hodgepodge of writings written for specific occasions. Still, one gets a good sense of the style of each composer, some real insights into the pieces under scrutiny, and lots of gossipy tales about all of them. Slonimsky was nothing if not a good storyteller.

So, this is not one of Slonimsky's major works, and it is not even a necessary work, as these things go, but it is at least generally fascinating and revealing, the sort of book to dip into as the need or desire arises. I've spent many enjoyable moments with it and expect that will continue.

Scott Morrison