Summary of Norman Lebrecht's Genius & Anxiety

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 In 1846, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a composer, came to visit his sister, Fanny, in Berlin. He had a present for her: a proof copy of his new piano trio in C minor, a work of joyous vivacity.

#2 Felix’s relationship with his sister was very close, but he never allowed her to publish any of her songs. He was afraid that her piano works might hurt his reputation.

#3 In 1847, Felix died of a stroke, just like his mother. He had been exhausted from conducting and painting, and his hands had gone numb. He had been conducting six morbid Lieder, opus 71, when his hands lost sensation.

#4 The death of Felix Mendelssohn, at 38, reminds people of Mozart’s at a similar age. His reputation falls like a cemetery angel in a winter storm. Wagner, in his mid-thirties, seizes the opportunity to discredit him and prove his own credentials.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669398967

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Insights on Norman Lebrecht's Genius Anxiety

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 14

Insights from Chapter 15

Insights from Chapter 16

Insights from Chapter 17

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 1846, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a composer, came to visit his sister, Fanny, in Berlin. He had a present for her: a proof copy of his new piano trio in C minor, a work of joyous vivacity.

#2

Felix’s relationship with his sister was very close, but he never allowed her to publish any of her songs. He was afraid that her piano works might hurt his reputation.

#3

In 1847, Felix died of a stroke, just like his mother. He had been exhausted from conducting and painting, and his hands had gone numb. He had been conducting six morbid Lieder, opus 71, when his hands lost sensation.

#4

The death of Felix Mendelssohn, at 38, reminds people of Mozart’s at a similar age. His reputation falls like a cemetery angel in a winter storm. Wagner, in his mid-thirties, seizes the opportunity to discredit him and prove his own credentials.

#5

Heine and Mendelssohn were both Jews, and they did not like each other at all. Heine was a poet, and he did not want to earn his living by poetry. Heine converted to Lutheranism, and then became twice as Jewish when he stopped being a Jew.

#6

Heine’s poems, stage plays, travel journals and screeds of journalism poured forth. He was untroubled by any need for balance or accuracy. He was bigoted, rumbustious, and hypocritical. Heine lived his life from the outside in.

#7

Heine was a poet who wrote about Germany. He used simple nouns and verbs, and reveled in dualities. He liked to play with the words and meanings of sentences. He did not care for composers, as a breed, and they used his poems without payment.

#8

Heine was extremely critical of Felix Mendelssohn, and he hated him for misusing his God-given talents to serve the Church. He felt that Mendelssohn was the anti-Heine, and he could not put him out of his mind.

#9

Karl Marx was a German philosopher who developed an ideology based on the ideas of German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He met Heine by chance in a newspaper office, and he was determined to make a Marxist of Heine.

#10

Before he can get to work on Engels’s research, Marx has to write two essays. The first is a review of a paper by Bruno Bauer, a student of Hegel’s who argues that Jews should not have equal rights. The second is a essay titled On The Jewish Question, which argues that Jews should not have equal rights because their religious practices and separations promote a Jewish tendency to materialism.

#11

Isaiah Berlin, in his book on Marx, first published in 1939, ignores the anti-Jewish content of the essay. He argues that Marx was trying to redeem Jews and Christians alike from God. But Marx still believed that Judaism was a personal stigma.

#12

Heine’s poems had a huge impact on Marx, and he eventually converted to communism. While Engels gave Marx hard economic facts, Heine showed him how to write a headline.

#13

The leader of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, was a very unpolitical man. He had