A treasure trove for one-sided classical music listeners

Wherever you open the book, a surprise is always possible, especially if you are rather biased towards "great classical music". The multicultural music listener, author and presenter Roger Willemsen succeeds time and again in eloquently "foisting" his "declarations of love for music" on the reader without expert frippery, so that one becomes (rightly) all the more aware of the decades of one-sidedness. In five chapters, moods, portraits, comparisons of "classical music and jazz" as well as world music and the incidental are offered, with different focuses, but mostly in a combination of sparingly applied historical knowledge and personal musical experience. His fixed points are John Coltrane, who "perhaps covered the musical universe more extensively than anyone before or after him", and jazz in all its facets. However, he is not primarily concerned with describing the music, but with "exploring the feelings" when listening to music; and here he has a wondrously rich vocabulary at his disposal. But all, even the most differentiated explorations are nothing without the corresponding sound; as if the menu were described to you in flowery terms, but you were not given any of it to eat. After reading Willemsen's comments, you can immediately check whether they apply to you: Almost all the titles mentioned can be listened to on YouTube - (still) for free, by the way.

The greatest discoveries are possible. In the 50 classical and jazz combinations, Willemsen juxtaposes pieces that reveal interesting similarities when exploring the emotions: Lennie Tristano's staccato playing after Muzio Clementi's G major Allegro, for example, or the adventurously nimble trumpet in Cherokee by Arturo Sandoval, after Niccolo Paganini's Moto perpetuo listened to. The Nocturne with the Teddy Charles Quintet compared to the third of Anton Webern's five orchestral pieces. It may be that some comparisons meet with incomprehension or that repetitions are noticeable, that one does not want to "prepare for an attack on the sentimental center", that some emotionally conditioned judgments seem a little too casual or that "mockery as a greeting" for Rex Gildo is superfluous. But the information about the "largely forgotten" pianist Jutta Hipp comes just in time for the current discussion about the revision of copyright law: shortly before her death, someone noticed that she was entitled to 40,000 dollars in royalties for records that had been sold after the end of her career. Do today's distribution media also have such a long-term memory?

Finally, however, an oddity: Jacques Loussier, who was of no small importance to our generation in terms of "broadening our horizons", is not mentioned. At the beginning of the 1970s, it was still noted on the "Loussier, Jacques - Play Bach" index card in the Bern radio studio that these records could only be used in the program "after consultation with the head of the music department". Clearly, when Willemsen (born in 1955) came within earshot of Loussier playing Bach, it was no longer a sensation.

Roger Willemsen: Music! About an attitude to life, 512 p., € 24.00; S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2018, ISBN 978-3-10-397383-9