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It's an unassailable fact that classical music conductors tend to live very long lives - unless they are cut down in their prime, like Dinu Lipatti, for example. But by and large, it's commonplace for maestros to live well into their seventies and, in many cases, beyond. On the podium, after all, they do lead very active lives. I shall never forget the acrobatic leap of Bernstein when he conducted the LSO in Mahler's Resurrection Symphony in Ely Cathedral that Easter when I discovered Mahler for the very first time. He, of course, outlived Karajan, but he was lucky to do so for he was a very heavy smoker. As far as I'm aware, Karajan didn't smoke - I've never seen a photo of him smoking, at any rate. But he was troubled with back pain following a fall from a tree as a young boy. He was eighty years old when he died, and this issue of Gateway is a reminder of what an extraordinary person he was. |
You're probably asking youself (or me) what on Earth the great Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan is doing in a literary review magazine. Well, my nonfiction book of the month is RICHARD OSBORNE's HERBERT VON KARAJAN ~ A LIFE IN MUSIC, and it's a real blockbuster, the definitive work on Karajan, and, even if you haven't
the remotest interest in classical music, it's a fascinating story of a man with as colourful a life and reputation as anyone who lived through the turbulent years of the twentieth century. In his heyday, he was an A-list celebrity that puts today's celebrities in the shade. The quote most often used about him is when he got into a London taxi and the driver asked him "where to?", to which he replied: "I'm wanted everywhere." And that was no exaggeration. He was a superstar, and he brought
classical music to millions of people - he was not a musical snob, in the sense that he thought classical music was for upper class intellectuals; as far as Karajan was concerned, music was for everyone, though his eyebrows would certainly have raised at the noises some of today's "pop stars" make. He probably never listened to anything outside the sphere of classical music, and he probably would not have listened to Classic FM. But he raised the profile of classical music with some of the most stunning
performances on record; he moved in exalted circles, of which he was usually the centre.
Just like William Shatner, he was larger than life, and I loved him. I know about his murky past, his courting of the Nazi party, and I know, in my heart, that he was not anti-Semitic, and only joined the party to further his career. I can forgive him for that, because his world was music, and his music making was sublime. I make no apologies for including the articles in this issue. It's my small tribute to a great, great man.
What I'm reading right now... Funny, I thought... we were watching TAGGART, they'd been called to a remote Scottish island where a corpse had been discovered, laid out on a standing stone, with both hands cut off, and the pathologist was of the opinion that the victim had been alive when the mutilation had taken place.
Now where had I just read something really similar? I dashed to the hall, opened my briefcase and took out the copy of MO HAYDER's RITUAL (Bantam HB) which had arrived in the post that morning, and reminded myself of what it said on the inside of the dustjacket: Just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, nine feet under water, police
diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand. The fact that
there's no body attached is disturbing enough. Yet more disturbing is the
discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. Both have been recently
amputated, and the indications are that the victim was still alive when they
were removed. Coincidence, I thought? Did the hands belong to Taggart's mutilated corpse, I wondered. Must be a coincidence. Taggart was brutally gruesome, a little over the top, though the story was pretty good. Mo Hayder, on the other hand... well, she can be gruesome, but the story is quite, quite different, very dark, having to do, as it does, with drugs and torture. But it's a darned good read, and it's keeping me quiet for a couple
of hours every night....
This month's "must-reads"... once again quite a few, but here's a small selection of the ones that have really entertained me this month:
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Gateway is published by Paul Edmund Norman on the first day of each month. Hosting is by Flying Porcupine at www.flyingporcupine.com - and web design by Gateway. Submitting to Gateway: Basically, all you need do is e-mail it along and I'll consider it - it can be any length, if it's very long I'll serialise it, if it's medium-length I'll put it in as a novella, if it's a short story or a feature article it will go in as it comes. Payment is zero, I'm afraid, as I don't make any money from Gateway, I do it all for fun! For Advertising rates in Gateway please contact me at paulenorman@yahoo.co.uk Should you be kind enough to want to send me books to review, please contact me by e-mail and I will gladly forward you my home address. Meanwhile, here's how to contact me: paulenorman@yahoo.co.uk