Dmitri Esterhaats - Softcover

Hardin, Russell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0916727270 ISBN 13: 9780916727277

Publisher: Wings Press, 2007

Synopsis

Set mostly in New York with a dense background of European culture, this enlightening story of musical passion documents the coming-of-age of pianist Dmitri Esterhaats as he develops from precocious adolescent to professional virtuoso. Esterhaats’ gradual mastery of each new piece, from Bach to Bartók, draws upon the cultural and anecdotal history of the music itself. Meanwhile, Esterhaats finds his creative muse amongst the female musicians he accompanies, entangling the eroticism of making music and making love to the point that physical passion and ethereal passion become indistinguishable.

About this title

About the Author

Russell Hardin is a professor of political science at New York University. He is the author of Collective Action, Perhaps It Was Never the Same, and What We Go By.

From Publishers Weekly

Hardin, best known as a New York University political theorist (Indeterminacy and Society) checks in with his third work of fiction, a grounded look at New York's postwar classical music world. Dmitri Esterhaats, half-Jewish with a paternal Hungarian grandfather, has gone from precocious child pianist in Lenin-era Kiev to refugee-in-hiding with his Menshevik parents in Amsterdam to teenage New York immigrant in the 1930s. By 16, he's accompanying Sofia Milano, a soprano of uncertain age who initiates him into performance, musically and otherwise. After their long international tour (which ends acrimoniously), Dmitri is drafted into WWII, where he becomes a personal musician to a music-loving colonel. At 30, his uncompromising nature, high standards and extreme reticence eventually bring him to a beautiful Hungarian woman, Jelly Ujfalussy, and to violinist Linda Ney, who is as intense as he. What Hardin is after is immigrant relationships forged in the competitive furnace of postwar American classical music performance. A love of classical music is required to understand in depth all of what takes place, Dmitri is little more than a cipher, and some of the dialogue is joltingly stock. But Dmitri serves nicely as a medium for Hardin's passionate imaginings of a microculture in flux. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Wings Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0916727270
• ISBN 13: 9780916727277
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320