Thomas Mann

“His ambivalence towards Wagner, as towards everything actually, is fascinating. With Wagner, he said his relationship was one of ‘love without belief’. He didn’t accept a lot of Wagner. Wagner’s worldliness and appetite for worldly success, combined with his ascetic dedication to his art—Wagner said ‘a day without work is a nightmare for me’—Mann found that to be the paradigm of the artistic constitution. It’s an illuminating book. He wrote it at the end of 1932 and the start of 1933. He was very politically aware by then, he lived in Munich. He constantly saw street battles and his children were involved in scuffles with Nazis, so he knew what the score was.” Read more...

The best books on Wagner

Michael Tanner, Musicians, Music Critics & Scholar

“The story is about a family vacation. The narrator, his wife and two young children—all German—travel to the town of Torre di Venere, a little town in Italy, in the 1920s. It begins with joy and enthusiasm and quickly deteriorates when the family meets the phenomena of Italian nationalism and Fascism. At the centre of the story is a hypnotists’s performance that ends in an unexpected and tragic way.” Read more...

David Grossman on the Books That Shaped Him

David Grossman, Novelist

“Von Aschenbach has been an artist but a very formulaic one. He’s had great acclaim, but he’s never been struck by the divine madness. And then he is struck. In Death in Venice—as in Plato’s Phaedrus—an erotic madness and artistic madness are merged together; for von Aschenbach the instrument of this merging is Tadzio, a young boy. The mad experience is falling in love with beauty, as embodied in this young boy. What the novel is really asking us to contemplate or judge is: is it the good, or is it the bad kind of madness?” Read more...

The Best Philosophical Novels

Rebecca Goldstein, Philosopher

“Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain introduces us to Eros and Thanatos, the twin forces of life and death, and they become the subject of profound meditations and conversation. There’s more than a whiff of spookiness to the work, a fascination with disease, suffering, and death. Mann described his novel as a Zeitroman, a novel that takes time as its subject matter but also captures an entire era.” Read more...

Talismanic Tomes

Maria Tatar, Literary Scholar

“It’s extraordinary. It’s set in Germany in the early decades of the 20^th century. Adrian Leverkühn is this fictional German composer who has a likeness to Arnold Schoenberg in that he develops a 12-tone system. He also makes a deal with the demon Mephistopheles—to create wonderful music for a certain time before being taken off, like Faust in the legend, to a horrible fate.” Read more...

The best books on Sound

Caspar Henderson, Journalist