Books in Brief

My Life and Music, by Artur Schnabel: ed. and with introd, by Edward Crankshaw (St. Martin’s, $4.50). The great pianist gave twelve lectures at Chicago in 1945. A British journalist has touched them up a bit for publication and added the choicest juice squeezed out of the Q-and-A sessions. For musicians this book holds much music; for people, much people. Schnabel, after all, was so: he would have loved the title, for he would not have spoken of his life and work: music is not work. He told his students to “go . . . and make music.” His was a life-long rhapsody of tone, wound around a tonic he accepted, sung in melodies hung on a dominant he taught another generation to sing. Withal he gives the story of an artist; a sketch of Europe before and after Hitler; the frame of intellect from Liszt to Freud to Einstein; the mystery of composition and performance; the place of teaching in the work of creation; the place of music in life. The student will find enough of pianistic pedagogy, the humanist an evening’s rumination on every page. W. F. RICKENBACKER