In decades of reviewing, I have never yet received three books which I would spontaneously turn into the subject of a single article. How Eisler and Henze hang together need hardly be explained: but 'poles apart' would be a misleading metaphor for them, on the one hand, and Cooke, on the other, for the North Pole and the South Pole have more in common. Amusingly enough, Eisler's ambivalently beloved teacher Schoenberg lived in the world of Cooke, who, likewise ambivalently and at least theoretically, felt uneasy about the destroyer of tonality.

LRB 21 October 1982 | PDF Download