With a foreword by Daniel Barenboim.
Music at the Limits is the first book to bring together three decades of Edward Said’s essays and articles on music.
‘What Said stands for – critical intelligence, high art and the preservation of the language – must be at the centre of our lives.’ Hanif Kureishi
Addressing the work of a wide variety of composers, musicians, and performers – from Mozart to Alfred Brendel – Edward Said analyses music’s social, political, and cultural contexts and, as a classically trained pianist, provides rich and often surprising assessments of classical music and opera.
This book offers both a fresh perspective on well-known pieces and a celebration of neglected works. Said laments the way in which opera superstars like Pavarotti have ‘reduced opera performance to a minimum if intelligence and a maximum of overproduced noise’. He also reflects on the censorship of Wagner in Israel; an opera based on the life of Malcolm X; the relationship between music and feminism; the brilliant Canadian pianist Glenn Gould; and the works of Bach, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Pierre Boulez, and others.
Said wrote his incisive critiques as both an insider and an authority. Always eloquent and often surprising, Music at the Limits preserves an important dimension of Said’s brilliant intellectual work and cements his reputation as one of the most influential and groundbreaking writers of the twentieth century.

"In this virtuoso intellectual performance, he weaves around his main subject of discussion supporting threads of social, historical, literary, philosophical, and political considerations, creating a grand, unified, visionary whole. Throughout the book, Said’s clear, passionate prose resonates with energy and vitality." (Radu Lupu)

A szerzőről:
Edward Said was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He was the author of more than twenty books, including Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism and On Late Style and his essays and reviews appeared in newspapers and periodicals throughout the world. Edward Said died in September 2003.