Colonel Klink
Okay, Terry Teachout, I'm going to take your word for it and put Peter Heyworth’s biography of Otto Klemperer on my reading list.
For those of you who cannot be bothered to follow the link, I'm talking about a mid-century conductor who became famous for stern, solemn and downright spooky interpretations of the great German orchestral standards. That doesn't grab you? How about a story of a life that includes brilliance, bar brawling, escape from genocide, bipolar disease, multiple religious conversions and embarassing/horrifying accidents (like a brain-damaging fall from a stage or self-immolation)? You still find that dull? What if I told you we're talking about Colonel Klink's father? Now are you interested?
I spent 2003 reading composer biographies and I learned a few things. Yes, I learned about Silbelius' alcoholism and Prokovief's ditching of his first wife and Copland's boyfriends and Stravinsky's constant money squabbles and fights with old friends from St. Petersburg who were jealous and provincial and how he ditched his first wife. But what I really learned is that there are a lot of second-rate biographies to be found. It seems that a writer will get the gig because of his closeness to the subject, not because of his writing skill. And when the subject is merely famous, like Sibelius, even a large library won't have many biographies to choose from. Only with a figure with a certain prescence in the pop culture, like Bernstein, will you find a good selection.
I liked Howard Pollack's take on Copland, but loved Humphery Burton's Leonard Bernstein. I recommend you read them together, now that I know how much their lives were, uh, intertwined. For Stravinsky I haven't yet found anything I thought worth finishing, and I haven't even looked at Robert Craft's writing because I doubt it can be sufficiently objective. For coverage of Sibelius, Prokofiev and Ravel I had to rely on brief biographies from this series by Phaidon, but the authors recruited are not the best.
My pick for the winner of the biography contest is Humphrey Carpenter's Benjamin Britten: a Biography. Scroll down in the link and you will see Kirkus Reviews found it "first rate, if less than magisterial." I can't say I felt the deprivation from this magisterium deficit. I thought the book was the right length with the right combination of sympathy and honesty.
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
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