Why a ‘Peanuts’ Collection Has Stuck With Jeremy Denk, Concert Pianist

The magnificent singer Ian Bostridge wrote a considerate, deep e-book on “Winterreise.” My pal Steven Isserlis, a musician’s musician, wrote an important companion to the Bach Cello Suites. Now we have to be grateful to Anne Midgette for sitting with Leon Fleisher and recording his life and musical insights, and there are current memoirs from the nice pianists Andras Schiff, Stephen Hough and Alfred Brendel. One needs for Mitsuko Uchida to jot down one thing!

Personally, proper now I’m deep in, re-re-reading and considering by Susan McClary’s nice, controversial work of feminist musicology: “Female Endings.” She takes no prisoners, dismantling the mantles of Western classical narratives, and reinserting intercourse into musicology’s usually musty area.

Do you rely any books as responsible pleasures?

Because the son of a lapsed monk, all my pleasures are responsible.

Has a e-book ever introduced you nearer to a different individual, or come between you?

I usually talked books with my late pal, the composer Michael Friedman. I instructed him I beloved Franzen’s “The Corrections.” The e-book noticed into my soul. It was the novel-length rant I might have composed about my household if solely I hadn’t been so busy practising the piano! However then “Freedom” got here out — and God I hated it, with a verbose ardour. For months, each time I noticed Michael, I might begin in once more on how disappointing it was. Michael defended Franzen, mildly, then stridently. One night time, in a speakeasy within the West Village, he’d had sufficient. He screamed throughout the desk, “Not once more with ‘Freedom’!” The maître d’ seemed up with alarm. In a quieter, pressing tone Michael added that I ought to go to remedy as a result of my obsessive harping was making me much more annoying than Jonathan Franzen’s characters. That shut me up.

After my father was identified with power obstructive pulmonary illness later in life, we additionally talked about books. It was the one approach we may very well be, if not emotional, a minimum of emotion-adjacent. He desperately needed to know what I appreciated. I stated I used to be excited to learn the newest David Foster Wallace — “The Pale King” — and so my dad bought it, and we began in. A e-book membership of two. A 3rd of the way in which by, I started to appreciate I used to be forcing him to spend his valuable time wandering down twisted self-recursive prose visions of bureaucratic distress that I wasn’t even positive I needed to complete. So I known as and stated, “Dad, I’m so sorry!” He sighed with reduction.

I prompt “Pnin” as an alternative. God bless him, he dutifully purchased that one too. Some weeks later, he known as me. “The dishwashing scene,” he stated, with a tiny quaver in his voice, and that was it. This pierced me proper by the guts. How Pnin drops a leggy nutcracker into the sudsy sink filled with glass and hears a mysterious crack. How does Nabokov handle to make the prosaic act so luminous? We mentioned how Pnin changed the aquamarine glass bowl secure on the shelf, a present from his estranged stepson, and I spotted that we have been the identical, in important methods, and nonetheless we might by no means actually join.

What’s probably the most attention-grabbing factor you discovered from a e-book just lately?

Laurence Dreyfus (in his great “Wagner and the Erotic Impulse”) made me conscious that Richard Wagner had a fetish for composing in silk lingerie, and he despatched Nietzsche out buying to get him new undergarments. The imaginative and prescient of Nietzsche searching within the underwear retailer!