Vienna's Golden Years of Music, 1850-1900 Translated and Edited by Henry Pleasants III

Hanslick, Eduard ; [Paul Hume's Copy]

Published by Simon And Schuster, New York, 1950

New York: Very Good. 1950. First Edition; First Printing. Autograph; Publisher's two-tone cloth, beige spine lettered in gilt and black over pale red buckram with a facsimile signature of Eduard Hanslick on the front cover. A sound copy, worn but without major flaws, lacking the dust jacket. Signed in ink at the top of the front free-endpaper: "Paul Chandler Hume / Washington Post" underneath the ownership signature is an ink inscription from the editor and translator: "From one critic to another / Henry Pleasants. " Indeed, Pleasants and Hume, near contemporaries, had been colleagues early in their respective careers. Pleasants, born in 1910, studied voice, piano and composition at the Curtis Institute, became a music critic for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and was the paper's music editor from 1934 to 1942. Philadelphia is a major musical town; one does not just stroll into one of the newspapers offices and announce that one intends to be a music critic. It appears that the young Henry Pleasants did more than write about music for the Bulletin; he worked a beat as a police reporter for a time. As the "second string" music critic, he was fortunate to work in support of Arthur Tubbs -- who had little interest in "modern" music. As a result, Pleasants got assignments to cover a series of musical events in Philadelphia before the War which one might expect to have been the natural turf of the "principal" critic. These included important premiers in the early thirties as the Philadelphia Orchestra's productions of Wozzeck, Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, Prokofiev's Pas d'Acier, Chavez's ballet H. P. Louis Greuenberg's The Emperor Jones, etc. , along with the host of experimental orchestral compositions with which Leopold Stokowski was using his growing fame to champion. After Pearl Harbor, Pleasants enlisted in the U. S. Army -- it appears that he found his way into Intelligence work. After the war, Pleasants rejoined the service as an army liaison officer with the Austrian government. He left the army to enter the Foreign Service in 1950, serving as an intelligence officer in Munich. When this book was published, he was the CIA station chief in Bern, Pleasants' career in the CIA was an active one, by 1956 he was the Agency's station chief in Bonn. One wonders how much of this second career was known to Paul Hume when Henry Pleasants incribed this book for him? The subject of the book is quite appropriate for the serious music critic. Pleasants' subject, Eduard Hanslick, was one of the most prominent critics in the world of European music -- as the multiple subjects of this book make clear. He became, after initial support, a fierce critic of Richard Wagner's music and influence -- even knowing at the time that the world had turned away from Hanslick's conservative preferences and that Wagner and figures within his huge sphere of followers were likely to prevail in the sweep of history. It is impossible not to interpret Pleasants' interest in Hanslick as quite personal in light of the book that Mr. Pleasants published five years after this one: 'The Agony of Modern Music. ' Just a taste may suffice: "Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for 300 years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through its slag pile. " As for Mr. Pleasants' history as a spy, it should be noted that a modern journalist who knows both music and espionage published an article suggesting Henry Pleasants as Ian Flemings' real life model for James Bond's CIA counterpart (and some-time friend) Felix Leiter. Asked about this much later in his long life, Pleasants responded that he did know Ian Flemings (half) sister, the brilliant and beautiful cellist Amaryllis Fleming -- "who performed on occasion with my wife, in the same chamber orchestra, " [Referring to the first-rate; Music and Performing Arts, Most Recent Listing, Most Recent Listing. Seller Inventory # 44764

Bibliographic Details

Title: Vienna's Golden Years of Music, 1850-1900 ...
Publisher: Simon And Schuster, New York
Publication Date: 1950
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition.