Sam H. Shirakawa

It's astonishing to me that no scholarly biography of Furtwängler exists - there is nothing approaching Peter Heywood's Klemperer - and this book is certainly not that. Time and again you find yourself asking what does Shirakawa know about music? Why is he unable to write about it meaningfully or with understanding? And, where on earth is the evidence for many of the motivations he ascribes to Furtwängler?

If you want some idea of Furtwängler's career then this book will I suppose give you some orientation. That's it. The ramshackle nature of the enterprise is underlined by the unsystematic attempts at discography in the concluding chapters(even in the mid 1990s this was a pretty complicated picture).

Overall, how OUP thought this 'would do' editorially as a serious biography is beyond me.

One final word of warning - the Kindle edition is a dire product with text overrunning and superimposed all over the place. At least Amazon make it easy to seek a refund and find a printed version instead.… (mere)