Norman Lebrecht

"In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the way we see the world. Many of them are well known--Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin,...

Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does? Norman Lebrecht, one of the world's most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was--along with Picasso,...

"The triumph of music in the 20th century was its abundant pluralism. This Companion is, I believe, the first to define and applaud that diversity," says Norman Lebrecht. The Companion to 20th Century Music celebrates the extraordinary range of musical accomplishment in this century: from atonality, neoclassicism and serialism to minimalism, computer music, and sheer chance. It recognizes and evaluates the successors to Verdi and Puccini, Brahms and...

An emotional detective story spread over two continents and a half-century. Beneath the film's stunning and pulsing musical revelations burn the horror of war, and the lost souls extinguished from history.