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landofnowherePrincess Napraxine, Ouida. lunabee34's readalong continues with Volume 3, which I'm now halfway into and everyone is kind of miserable. Very curious how things will resolve (or not resolve, as there is a sequel).
Impressions that Remained, Vol 1. and Vol 2., Ethel Smyth. So part of why I haven't posted in a few weeks is that I keep on feeling like I should write a review that will do this book justice, and I haven't managed it. So I'm going to try for some quick takes.
The most delightful part of this book is the section about Smyth's student days in Leipzig, where she gets to live independently, meet all sorts of musical personages, befriend interesting women, and encounter so much more music than she had been able to experience in England -- she mentions hearing Beethoven's Seventh for the first time, as well as an early performance of Brahms's Second Symphony conducted by the composer (who wasn't a particularly good conductor, and the orchestra didn't know what to make of the work). I only discovered this later, but Liana Serbescu has an album of the piano works that Smyth wrote as a student, which, although Smyth dismisses them as insignificant early works, would make a good soundtrack to this section. (Srsly, where is the Ethel Smyth biopic? There is no shortage of material in her life.)
Ethel Smyth realizes that people don't want to have their reading of a memoir interrupted by lengthy quoted letters, so she puts the relevant letters in appendices interspersed throughout. This mostly works, as a lot of the letters are interesting enough to read on their own (it's fascinating getting older Smyth's account of her student days followed by the letters she sent home to her mother), but works less well in the second volume where the appendices interrupt the story more often.
I will be looking for further reading on Ethel Smyth: she has no shortage of published memoirs, but I think at this point I want an outside perspective. The easiest to get would be Leah Broad's group biography Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World, though the sample I read felt a bit shallow. I became more interested in Christopher St. John's 1959 biography of Smyth when I realize that the author was a lesbian suffragist writing under a male name. Unfortunately it's harder to find, but I will hopefully track it down sometime. (There's also an abridged version of Smyth's memoirs available on OpenLibrary, but it doesn't seem to have much contextualizing material.)
Oh, also I can't quit Smyth without recommending her orchestral/vocal work The Prison written later in her life, which grabbed me from its first moments when I listened to it and is really not quite like anything else. The performance is excellent and I can see how it won a Grammy.
(Bedtime, so Brandon Sanderson and Sarah Caudwell will have to wait for another post.)
lunabee34's readalong continues with Volume 3, which I'm now halfway into and everyone is kind of miserable. Very curious how things will resolve (or not resolve, as there is a sequel).Impressions that Remained, Vol 1. and Vol 2., Ethel Smyth. So part of why I haven't posted in a few weeks is that I keep on feeling like I should write a review that will do this book justice, and I haven't managed it. So I'm going to try for some quick takes.
The most delightful part of this book is the section about Smyth's student days in Leipzig, where she gets to live independently, meet all sorts of musical personages, befriend interesting women, and encounter so much more music than she had been able to experience in England -- she mentions hearing Beethoven's Seventh for the first time, as well as an early performance of Brahms's Second Symphony conducted by the composer (who wasn't a particularly good conductor, and the orchestra didn't know what to make of the work). I only discovered this later, but Liana Serbescu has an album of the piano works that Smyth wrote as a student, which, although Smyth dismisses them as insignificant early works, would make a good soundtrack to this section. (Srsly, where is the Ethel Smyth biopic? There is no shortage of material in her life.)
Ethel Smyth realizes that people don't want to have their reading of a memoir interrupted by lengthy quoted letters, so she puts the relevant letters in appendices interspersed throughout. This mostly works, as a lot of the letters are interesting enough to read on their own (it's fascinating getting older Smyth's account of her student days followed by the letters she sent home to her mother), but works less well in the second volume where the appendices interrupt the story more often.
I will be looking for further reading on Ethel Smyth: she has no shortage of published memoirs, but I think at this point I want an outside perspective. The easiest to get would be Leah Broad's group biography Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World, though the sample I read felt a bit shallow. I became more interested in Christopher St. John's 1959 biography of Smyth when I realize that the author was a lesbian suffragist writing under a male name. Unfortunately it's harder to find, but I will hopefully track it down sometime. (There's also an abridged version of Smyth's memoirs available on OpenLibrary, but it doesn't seem to have much contextualizing material.)
Oh, also I can't quit Smyth without recommending her orchestral/vocal work The Prison written later in her life, which grabbed me from its first moments when I listened to it and is really not quite like anything else. The performance is excellent and I can see how it won a Grammy.
(Bedtime, so Brandon Sanderson and Sarah Caudwell will have to wait for another post.)