I read a review of a novel with musical background just last Sunday in
the New York Times and had to have it.  I've just finished it and it's
marvelous, if more than a little disturbing.  It is 'Variations of the
Beast' by Henry Grinberg.

Here is my customer review at Amazon.com:

   http://www.amazon.com/dp/0976818116/classicalnet/

"Ferenc Kapp, who renames himself Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder after he
discovers that Kapp means 'condom' in street-German, is the narrator
and protagonist of this novel set in Austria and Germany in the Weimar
Republic period and later the Nazi era.  Kapp, from a humble Austro-Hungarian
Magyar background, has a world-class gift for classical music, first as
a pianist and later as a magnificent orchestral conductor.  He also is
amoral, vain, sexually driven and blindly ambitious.  One follows his
rise in the music world against a background of the relentless burgeoning
of Nazi antisemitism.  Not particularly political himself, he is nonetheless
never at a loss for claiming the main chance and his ability to manipulate
people or take advantage of favorable events is detailed in his own at
first nayve and later calculating narration.  Author Henry Grinberg, a
New York psychoanalyst whose first novel this is, provides a page-turning
story.  This book will be particularly interesting for those interested
in classical music and in events of the first half of the twentieth
century in Germany.  As primarily a classical music reviewer, I was
transfixed by the musical matters of the story, noting no obvious solecisms
in the detailing of this complicated subject.  I was sickened by the
almost matter-of-fact telling of the anti-Semitic attitudes and horrendous
acts of the era as witnessed and participated in by Kapp-Dortmunder.
This was definitely a book with more than its share, for me, of
approach-avoidance.  And yet I couldn't put it down.

There is some awkward writing and plotting, but on the whole this book
provides a believable description, if not explanation, of how the good
German Volk could simultaneously pour heart and soul into the creation
of great musical art while committing horrendous and inhumane acts.  "

Scott Morrison

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