Essays on Music/Three Psychoanalytical Notes on "Peter Grimes"/Beethoven's String Quartets in F Minor, Op. 95, and C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131: Two Studies
1997; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2291-2436
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoHans Keller. Essays on Music. Edited by Christopher Wintle, with Bayan Northcott and Irene Samuel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xx, 269 pp. ISBN 0-521-46216-9 (hardcover). Hans Keller. Three Psychoanalytical Notes on Peter Grimes. Edited by Christopher Wintle. London: Institute of Advanced Musical Studies in association with The Britten-Pears Library, 1995. 51 pp. ISBN 1-897747-02-0 (softcover). Hans Keller and Christopher Wintle. Beethoven's String Quartets in F minor, op. 95, and C-sharp minor, op. 131: Two Studies. Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1995. 55 pp. ISBN 0-9518354-2-4 (softcover). I Hans Keller died on 6 November 1985. A few months later a documentary programme about his life and work was aired on British national television. Tributes were offered by Lord Yehudi Menhuin, Alfred Brendel, Sir William Glock, Robbins Landon, members of the Darlington String Quartet, and prominent individuals from the world of sport and journalism (about which more later). Menuhin talked of Keller's insistence on the highest standards of music criticism; Brendel referred to a public lecture he had once heard Keller give on the Haydn string quartets, delivered extempore finest I have ever witnessed); while Glock mentioned Keller's well-known ability to read modern scores with fluency. It would have been an impressive enough tribute for a film star. For a musicologist it was unprecedented. Keller himself has told us about his early childhood and adolescence in Vienna, in language both memorable and moving.1 Both his parents were musical and used to play the standard orchestral repertory in piano arrangements at home. His mother was also a string player, and the quartet in which she played also rehearsed at home. All his childhood, then, he was was surrounded by the Viennese Classics, a repertory he soon knew intimately. Keller himself was trained as a violinist, and played in string quartets. His usual role was to play the second violin, while his mentor, Guido Adler (who had earlier been Schoenberg's friend and teacher), played the first. Not surprisingly, these early years laid the foundations for two of Keller's lifelong passions: the string quartet and the music of Arnold Schoenberg. Although he never pursued a career as a soloist, the practical business of making music was important for his later work in music theory and criticism; for he maintained that it is impossible to have a secure grasp of either unless you play an instrument - however imperfectly. You must come to music from the inside. Apart from music, the other great love of his youth was soccer, a game he played well, on which he became expert, and about which he later wrote some stimulating articles. He was a supporter of the Hakoah team (a Hebrew word for strength or power), and knew by heart the names of all the great players and their scoring averages. Danny Blanchflower, the captain of England's famed Tottenham hotspurs team, considered Keller the best writer on soccer of his generation. In the spring of 1938 his world came tumbling to the ground with the Anschluss, and Hitler's arrival in Vienna. As a wealthy, middle-class Jew (his father was a highly successful architect), Keller was an obvious target and was picked up by the SS, interrogated for three days, tortured, then released. After months of delay, he was given a visa for England. Such pieces of paper were often considered worthless by the Nazis, and the railway stations were manned with checkpoints. Keller's uncle (the influential editor of the Prager Tagblatt) arranged for him to fly from Vienna to Prague, a rare mode of locomotion in those days (unlikely to attract the same level of attention as trains), and thence to London. He arrived in the city that was to remain his home for the rest of his life, in December 1938, not long before the outbreak of World War II. But his troubles were by no means over; he was interned by the British in 1940 as an enemy alien and imprisoned for a while on the Isle of Man. …
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