This collection should get SIX stars. Having sampled one of Audio Connoisseur's other recordings, and being hugely impressed, I went out and purchased this one. I had always wanted to know a little about German literature, assuming that a nation that can build fabulous cars could also produce a few good authors. Before I say anything about the stories, let me just tell you that the narrator, Charlton Griffin, is probably the greatest reader now living. I say that in all honesty. Never have I encountered recorded literature in which ALL the characters, including women and children, have been performed with such utter believability and astonishing acumen. You will shake your head in disbelief that only one person is performing all these voices. I differ with the above AudioFile reviewer who castigates Griffin for his pacing. The pacing is perfect, almost stately. In the appropriate places it has a dreamlike quality. The stories are a very good cross section of German literature over a period of 150 years, beginning with Goethe and ending with Lampe. Every single one of these little masterpieces has a jewel-like quality and a sparkling intelligence behind them. I approached this subject with mild trepidation and came away astonished at the variety and depth of German writers. My favorites in this volume were the stories by Mann, von Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler. Not content with merely great stories, Audio Connoisseur has tastefully added music and sound effects...but only in perfectly suitable places and without distraction. They seem to fit in organically, as though a film were rolling in your head. If you are an educator, this would be an indispensable teaching tool. My admiration for Audio Connoisseur knows no bounds at this point. May they continue this level of quality forever.

Thomas Benjamin's book is a great continuation for serious students of counterpoint. Neccessary prerequisites include basic understanding of traditional harmony and a firm understanding of basic species counterpoint. When armed with this background, students will find this book an invaluable guide into the deeper aspects of Bach's musical style. (All serious composition students should go through this series, and yes its a 5 to 50 year project!) Through examples and excercises the student will learn to apply the same considerations to his writting, if not the same sublimity, as one of the greatest musical masters of known history. Progressive excercises show the student how to synthesize harmonic considerations, counterpoint guidelines, and stylistic techninques (rhythmic figures and motiffs and the like) in a way that leads to satisfying musical conclusions. Once smaller scale writting excercises are mastered, no small feat and nothing to be rushed, the student then is ready to tackle larger musical forms. The satisfaction that emerges from such work is immeasurable, and this book is one of the only successfull treatments of the subject. Once again, this book shouldn't be undertaken without at least a year's study in traditional harmony, and a years in species counterpoint. Once this has been acomplished, the study of Bach's counterpoint is the logical continuation. Hats off! to Mr. Benjamin.

You don't have to love chess to follow this tale through the chess world; you have to love a good story about what makes people (not to mention Automatons) tick. The characters are reminiscient of Crime and Punishment (and I mean that as a compliment) with their murky motivations. What makes this even more outstanding is that it is based on a real chess caper nearly pulled off but foiled by Poe...

^You have misspelled the name:

Please write _Les_ Levine in the next issue

It is not only recommended, but it is incumbent on anyone who wishes to read this book to read "The Sorrows Of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first. Otherwise, this book will make no sense whatsoever.

Mann writes a hilarious tale of "what if?" the real life Charlotte Kestner & Goethe met up in Weimer 50 or so years after the publication of Werther. The result is a true masterpiece of writing. We get to meet Charlotte, as well as Arthur Schopenhaur's rather ditzy (at least in this novel, anyway) sister, Adele along with the almighty Goethe himself. The book centers around an interesting question: which is more real? The true life Charlotte? Or the fictional one of Werther? This is an intriguing question, as Mann furnishes the "real" Kestner (which is also a fictional one) with a "real" personality; something which was rather lacking in Goethe's story.

The book has everything one would want for fans of both Goethe and Mann. It articulates the "pressures" put on people who exist in reality who provide the inspiration for fictional characters in novels. Who, in fact, has it worse? The innocent individual who is inserted into fictional stories? Or the artist who feeds personal experiences into the machinery of his genius with the efficacy of producing great art? Who makes the greater sacrifice in the name of creativity?

This is a truly wonderful book. Although most of Mann's books have a distinctive humor to them, this one is much more lighthearted than any of his others. There is even a wonderful chapter in which we first meet Goethe....a stream-of-consciousness which asks the $60,000 question: what HAPPENS inside a mind as massive as Goethe's? It kind of reminded me of Hermann Broch's "The Death Of Virgil" which asked a similar question regarding the mental acumen of Virgil in a stream-of-consciousness way. In either case, who could ask for anything more?

Firstly, I've read many versions of The Art of War by Sun Tzu and they all seemed to be translated by someone with Chinese as their native language, rather than English. This translation is as clear as they get. Napoleon's maxims are short and sweet. The other works contained herein are also easy to read and are packed with simple, eternal principles of warfare.

Goethe comes alive as a very real person, not just the famous German author, in this travel memoir detailing the two years he spent in Italy in the 1780's. A wonderful description of travel before airplanes and cameras. Somewhat tedious descriptions of geology and of his works-in-progress are frequent, but never too long.

It might be helpful to read (or re-read) the introduction after having read part of the book (say, into the first Roman visit).

In preparation for a trip to Italy, I began reading the accounts of famous travellers to that land: D.H. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Tobias Smollett, and now Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I had no great expectations but was knocked for a loop from page one.

Never before had I encountered a questing mind quite like Goethe's. Almost from the moment to left Carlsbad in September 1786, he was noticing the geological structures underlying the land and the flora and fauna above it. He sits down and talks with ordinary people without an attitude -- and this after he had turned the heads of half of Europe with his SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. Here he was journeying incognito, apparently knowing the language well enough to communicate with peasants, prelates, and nobility.

One who abhors marking books I intend to keep, I found myself underlining frequently. "In this place," he writes from Rome, "whoever looks seriously about him and has eyes to see is bound to become a stronger character." In fact, Goethe spent over a year in Rome learning art, music, science, and even sufferings the pangs of love with a young woman from Milan.

Bracketing his stay in Rome is a longish journey to Naples and Sicily, where he becomes acquainted with Sir Warren Hamilton and his consort Emma, the fascinating Princess Ravaschieri di Satriano, and other German travelers. One of them, Wilhelm Tischbein, painted a wonderful portrait of Goethe the traveller shown on the cover of the Penguin edition.

The translation of W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer is truly wonderful. My only negative comments are toward the Penguin editors who, out of some pennywise foolishness, have omitted translating the frequent Latin, Greek, and French quotes. I am particularly upset about the lack of a translation of the final quote from Ovid's "Tristia." In every other respect, this book is a marvel and does not at all read like a work written some 215 years ago. It is every bit as fresh and relevant as today's headlines, only ever so much more articulate!

This was billed as a good introduction to Goethe. I don't know, since this is the first Goethe I've read--but I'm delighted. It starts as a sojourn south, with detailed notations of rocks, geologic information and topography. Don't let that deter you! His description of eating just bread and red wine on his sea voyage to Sicily (because of his rolling seasickness) had me running for a bottle Italian Barbera! As my late great aunt would have said: "A nice, nice book."

I really wanted to love this book. I enjoyed reading Goethe's Italian Journey and I've read so many flattering things about Young Werther that I've looked forward for some time to the experience of finally reading it. Unfortunately, it just didn't grab me.

The positives include Goethe's poetic descriptions of nature and the powerful imagery they evoke and the frequently beautiful language with which Werther depicted his obsession with Lotte.

The primary problems I had with the work were the repetitiveness of Werther's self-pitying missives and a certain incredulity I could not shake relative to the foundations of his compulsion. In the final analysis, a persistent feeling that Werther was silly and unjustified in his fixation and self-indulgent in wallowing in his misery dulled the impact of his fate on my senses substantially.

I am hoping for better things from Faust...

There is no doubt about the literary poignancy of this book, or for that matter the masterful mind of its author. But it must be said that the undeniably strong sorrows of young Werther came from an all-consuming love of himself-not from love of another. Or rather he seemed in love with the idea of having someone to consume his idle days and, what he imagined, his large and thoughtful mind. His precipice, from which he condescended to view his every move, thought and encounter, was lofty indeed.

The pastoral atmosphere of the book is what captivated this reader. It's a pity Werther couldn't heed Albert and Lotte's sound advice about retuning his strong emotions...or at least spend more time under Linden trees with his Homer (this would have been my suggestion to him). Perhaps it was the poetry of the equally love-torn Ossian, which came to replace his classic text, that helped spur on his emotional demise. Whatever the case, it was painful to read of his self-indulgent romance with his ideas of love and devotion. He was kidding himself in the grandest and noblest fashion imaginable.

Please don't think me a heartless soul, or someone who couldn't possible understand such an intense love; I just didn't see it that way. However much frustration I felt at Werther's extreme pathos, I remained in awe of the beauty of Goethe's emotive and descriptive writing. Am I contradicting myself here...with talk of emotion? You be the judge.

OK, young fool falls in love with married girl. Becomes friend of the couple. Husband starts to get annoyed. Hero declares his love and then commits suicide. You can read that in the paper once in a while. So, why is this a great novel and a landmark of Romantic literature? Because it has a lot to make us think. A famous fact related to this book is that, short after it was published, a series of suicides took place in Europe, mostly by young guys in the same situation as Werther. That should set clear the influence and strenght of the novel. It is extremely well written; the scenery is gorgeous -rural, upper class Germany in the Eighteenth century. The book is written as a secret diary addressed to a trusted friend, and to any readers, young or old, it will strike a chord in their hearts. Tell me, who is there that never experienced dreams of punishing that insensible beloved from school by committing suicide and then have her cry and repent at the funeral? But most of us are still here, with her or, most likely, with someone else or alone. We survived love's infatuation; Werther did not, and he is now a prototype of unlimited love (or lack of maturity, depending on your point of view). I prefer to see it as a great story written, at an early stage, by one of the greatest geniuses of all time. "Werther"

For those familiar with the "Oxford Companion to ..." series, you will see that this lives up to the name. There is a lot of good information on his works and life here. I only give it 4 stars because it works better as a reference-type book to scroll through once in a while, and not quality literature to read in a few sittings.

The life of Johann Sebastian Bach - straddling two centuries and placing an indelible mark on the development of symphonic music - is a complex and multifaceted saga, but Professor John Butt and his talented crew of co-authors get straight to the bottom of it. Bach grew up at the tail end of the 16th century. As a young student at the Latin Grammar School (where Martin Luther himself once studied) he was a classic child prodigy, dismissed by jealous teachers as excessively cheeky, and simultaneously made the butt of cruel jokes concocted by the lesser students who were deeply behind him. To make things far worse, both of his parents died when he was only nine, and for a period he was reduced to selling buns in the street and living in an abandoned caboose. However opportunity opened the door just a crack when he was a late teen. This came when he moved to the small town of Arnstadt to try his hand as an organist - a fateful journey during which illness and hunger almost took him, until a kindly cattle-farming family nursed him back to health on a hearty diet of potatoes, rump roast, and healthy dairy air. At Arnstadt he wrote most of his best-loved early pieces, and while he toiled in seeming anonymity at the rear of the church, the congregation was truly over the moon about him, often straining to hear his gentle melodies over the odious sound of the preacher muttering darkly about Sodom and Gomorrah. At the time the town was a real hole, but Bach's uplifting passion for music rectified the situation for him and kept him from going under. Soon many of his most famous baroque pieces were in the can. Bach's longest residence was of course in the city of Leipzig from 1723 to 1750, where he progressed from early middle age until his doddering later years as an old duffer. It was in Leipzig that his met his longtime Welsh companion, Fanny W. Tokus, who was to so ease his journey into the ranks of the elderly. Professor Butt's thoughtful scholarship made this book a real gas to read, and it's uplifting to think that someone so handicapped by his very nom de plume could persuade such an erudite and impressive group of credentialed co-writers to hitch their wagons to his tailpipe.

Bach scholarship has mostly been positivistic: Chafe's attmept here is to approach the music with a greater critical stance through a submersion in the contrasts between the concepts surrounding keys and tonality and those which are applicable to lutheran dogmatic principles. Chafe bases his thesis, which is essentially that the tonal processes of the bach's sacred vocal music work in conjunction with the text, and, as such, form a highly important part of Bach's musical-religious exegesis.

Interesting, and plausible though this may seem, there is really very little evidence provided into which Chafe can mould his ideas:he finds consolation in the writings of Johann Kunhau who, he claims, endorses a hermeneutic approach, thus seemingly giving the go ahead to chafe's theory. It is not suprising that nowhere in the book does Chafe actually quote at length from Kuhnau, and this rightly sets the alarm bells ringing. The fact is that Kuhnau is not talking about the kind of hermeneutic's that chafe suggests - Kuhnau is concerned with linguistic and semantic musical adoptions (i.e. musical-rhetorical device), which is of course a world away from large scale tonal symbolism.
If Chafe's evidence is virtually nonexistant, then his interpretations are also misleading. Whilst, from time to time, his readings are convincing, there are others during which his reasoning borders on the asinine. He suggests that, in one cantata, the relative attributes of sharps and flats (and their related tonal procedural progressions - anabasis and catabasis) and reversed - i.e. instead of anabasis = positive, and catabasis = negative, the antithesis is true. The reversal is supposed to take place not uniformally across an entire piece, but rather between the arias and the recits across the whole work. Such tortuous logical patternings force his interpretations, and do little for their credibility, especially given the paucity of therotical documentation.
It is a bold attempt, but before such drawn out and complex interpretations should be attempted a greater effort should have been made to secure the facts that we actually have: what a pity.

One of the most popular books in the Netherlands about the St. Matthew Passion is called 'His Lightning, his Thunder', written by Martin van Amerongen. His basic line of thought is : forget about the texts, they're silly, weird and unimportant. This book proves the contrary is true. It makes you understand what the texts are saying, it makes you understand the religious ideas of Bach's time and it makes you understand why Bach wrote his works the way he did. Doing so, the book fills a missing link, as usual writings concentrate on the music only and the comments are usually superficial.

This is a scholarly study that will appeal to Bach scholars and choral conductors who are interested in the tonal underpinnings of Bach's vocal music and the world of affection as a rational statement of emotion. (This sounds like an oxymoron, but Bach's vocal music does reconcile faith and reason, and Chafe's intriguing study supports this view of Bach's music.) This book is most noteworthy for its discussion of anabasis (ascent toward sharp keys) and catabasis (its opposite, descent to flat keys) and the emotional-rhetorical meaning of this. It is well-written, very detailed, and makes a compelling case for re-thinking Bach's use of key structure. This book has limited appeal --- mostly to musicologists and theorists --- but is an excellent study for those so inclined. I consider it to be one of the best discussions of musical-rhetorical structure in Bach.