Kirjahaku

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was born in Vienna of immigrant parents. During his short life he produced an astonishing amount of music. Symphonies, chamber music, opera, church music, and songs (more than 600 of them) poured forth in profusion. His 'Trout' Quintet, his 'Unfinished' Symphony, the three last piano sonatas, and above all his song cycles Die Schone Mullerin and Winterreise have come to be universally regarded as belonging to the very greatest works of music. Who was the man who composed this amazing succesion of masterpieces, so many of which were either entirely ignored or regarded as failures during his lifetime? In her new biography, Elizabeth Norman McKay paints a vivid portrait of Schubert and his world. She explores his family background, his education and musical upbringing, his friendships, and his brushes and flirtations with the repressive authorities of Church and State. She discusses his experience of the arts, literature and theatre, and his relations with the professional and amateur musical world of his day. Schubert's manic-depressive temperament became of increasing significance in his life, and McKay shows how it was partly responsible for his social inadequacies, professional ineptitude, and idiosyncracies in his music. She examines Schubert's uneven physical decline after he contracted syphilis, traces its affect on his music, his hedonism, and sensuality.

Eve's Longing: The Infinite Possibilities in All Things is a story of a modern fictional saint in the making. In the course of Eve's twin spiritual and physical journeys. Deborah McKay's moving yet unsentimental novel explores alarming real-life resolutions to universal complexities and offers instead of answers the seductive and dangerous experience of its captivating central character. Eve is a shockingly original character: at once a philosopher, an artist with a highly developed visual imagination, and a visionary mystic. Her longing, as the subtitle suggests, is for: the Infinite Possibilities in All Things." In the course of her journey, this longing, which is essentially spiritual and philosophical in origin, becomes for us immediately tangible, sensuous, and fully real. Eve's longing takes her from New York City to a monastery in Assisi, Italy, the home of St. Francis, then back again to New York. Along the way her longing grows into a desire so intense that it engenders a compassion verging on the saintly and a cruelty equally as extreme. Her desires, when unfulfilled, lead to sexual excesses, hallucinations, and transformative spiritual visions. In the course of Eve's journey we meet characters both alive and dead: her sister Claire, her parents, her lovers, St. Francis, and the Virgin Mary: and two of her most intimate companions, the Spiral and the Pearl String, both creations of her own mind. Eve's Longing creates almost a new literary genre in literature. It combines the intimacy of an entrusting autobiography with the intrigue of a novel and the cool detachment of a clinical study. The consequence of Eve's Fascination with "The Infinite Possibilities in All Things"--the temptation to which the original and our Eve succumb--is both an end and a beginning.