![]() 1, had a power that suffers in attempts to describe it.įor Dudamel, Erivo and the L.A. Levit’s performances of Opus 111 as well as of Beethoven’s first piano sonata, Opus 2, No. If so, either Levit is a magician or “The Magician” built himself L.A.'s first magic castle. Before the concert I asked Levit what he thought of it. ![]() You can pick one up on the used market for a small fraction of the price of a Steinway. Once a popular American piano, known as a poor man’s Steinway, Wheelocks don’t have much of a reputation these days. The instrument is an unimpressive Wheelock baby grand. For him, he said, the piano was like a lost sheep returning home. Young Frido loved to pull them out and spread the comics over the floor next to the instrument. In the piano’s bench, where sheet music would be normally kept, the Manns stored old copies of The Times. I don’t know whether Susan Sontag actually heard this piano being played, but she once told me her obsession with music began as an awestruck teenager visiting Mann in his house.įrido Mann had other memories about the piano as well. Born in 1940, he visited his grandparents often and remembers falling asleep in his bedroom hearing the sounds of music coming from gatherings that might have included Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Arthur Rubinstein, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht and any number of literary and film luminaries with whom the Manns hobnobbed. He played it daily, and it held memories. It followed him throughout Switzerland, Italy and Germany. Krenek and Milhaud were more than likely visitors to the Mann House.įrido Mann, himself a distinguished writer who was trained as a musician and psychologist, inherited the piano from his grandmother in 1980. ![]() It also just happens that Deutsche Grammophon last spring released for the first time on CD Michael Mann’s stunning recordings from the 1950s of viola sonatas by Ernst Krenek and Arthur Honegger and pieces by Darius Milhaud. It happened to be the piece to open this year’s Ojai Music Festival as an apt reminder of 18 sorrowful pandemic months. Stravinsky wrote his solo viola “Elegy” for him. ![]() Mann’s youngest son and Frido’s father, Michael, was a violist in the San Francisco Symphony at the time he obtained the piano for his father. To this day, we cannot escape Mann connections with our musical landscape. It was here, at this piano in this spot, that the émigré philosopher and musical theoretician Theodor Adorno taught Mann his fanciful ideas of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111, which forms the basis of Chapter 8 in “Doctor Faustus.” It was here at this spot that pianist Igor Levit inaugurated the newly restored piano’s homecoming with a revelatory performance of Beethoven’s sonata Saturday as the highlight of an event that included a discussion with Frido Mann, Levit and German minister of state Michelle Müntefering, moderated by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. The writer needed but a few steps to reach the instrument and bang away on the “Tristan” chord to get in the proper mood while writing “Doctor Faustus,” Mann’s controversial late novel about the role of music and art in society. Donated by his favorite grandson, Frido Mann, the piano now sits in the exact place where it had been between 19, in a family room outside of Mann’s study in the Thomas Mann House. It’s Mann’s piano, which spent the last 70 years in Europe, and it has come home. What it witnessed could, itself, be material for a novel. One of them that Toíbín leaves out stood at the very center of these gatherings in the house. #WHEELOCK BABY GRAND PIANO PRICE FULL#and his house in Brentwood a center of intellectual life, full of exceptional figures. The German Nobel Prize laureate was at the time the most celebrated writer in L.A. Among the disappointments of Colm Toíbín’s new novel, “The Magician,” which imagines the life of Thomas Mann, is any real sense of the richly extravagant artistic life of the émigré community in 1940s Los Angeles.
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