Wenn die Musik nicht wär’

Ernst von Wolzogen, author of Kraft-Mayr, who liked to compare himself to Fontane ("I too am a realist with an ironic outlook"), approaches his genius Franz Liszt not with pathos—which Liszt's music, but also Liszt literature at the turn of the century, is overflowing with—but with humor. Franz Werfel's "unclouded passion" for the Italian opera master may be out of step with the times, but it did indeed usher in the Verdi renaissance in 1926. The visually powerful artist novel remains a document of fervent empathy with an opera world full of relentless truth-seeking. In contrast, Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game – a "Ludus tonalis" of early music – appears as dull "science fiction of inwardness."

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