For the 250th anniversary of George Frideric Handel’s death: a grand narrative treatise by Karl-Heinz Ott. The opera, London, castrati and divas people Handel’s world, but also philosophers, who became archenemies over the question of whether to ban the theatre. This book about the famous composer, as clever as it is entertaining, focuses on 18th-century music and in so doing also on the present day. The author Karl-Heinz Ott has worked for many years as an opera dramaturge and published countless essays on music. With his book on Handel he is also opening up to the layman a world which stretches way beyond the purely musical. He not only demonstrates how closely means of musical expression, historical developments and questions of philosophical principles are knit together, but above all proves that serious knowledge can be fascinatingly imparted. Anyone seeking to exlore the 18th century of George Frideric Handel finds himself inevitably confronted with the present day. If only because one ponders why baroque music no longer sounds as boring as it did 50 years ago and what that has to do with our ideas on music.
About the author:
Karl-Heinz Ott was born in Ehingen near Ulm in 1957. He was educated at a Catholic boarding-school and studied philosophy, German and musicology. He then worked as a dramatic adviser in Freiburg, Basle and Zurich. “Ins Offene” is his first novel, which appeared in 1998 and won the Sponsors’ Award of the Hölderlin Prize and the Thaddäus Troll Prize. For his second novel “Silence at Last” (“Endlich Stille”), which was published by Hoffmann und Campe in 2005, he was awarded the Alemannic Literature Prize, the Candide Prize and the Prize of LiteraTour Nord. |
