With a lifetime of experience, profound knowledge and understanding, and heartwarming appreciation, an internationally celebrated conductor and teacher answers the questions: Why should I listen to classical music? How can I get the most from the listening experience? A protégé of Leonard Bernstein--his colleague for eighteen years--and an eminent conductor who has toured and recorded all over the world, John Mauceri helps us to reap the joys and pleasures classical music has to offer. Briefly, we learn the way a musical tradition born in ancient Greece, embraced by the Roman Empire, and subsequently nurtured by influences from across the globe, gave shape to the classical music that came to be embraced by cultures from Japan to Bolivia. Then Mauceri examines the music itself, helping us understand what it is we hear when we listen to classical music: how, by a kind of sonic metaphor, it expresses the deepest recesses of human feeling and emotion; how each piece bears the traces of its history; how the concert experience--a unique one each and every time--allows us to discover music anew. Unpretentious, graceful, instructive, this is a book for the aficionado, the novice, and anyone looking to have the love of music fired within them.

ジョン・モーチェリが綴るのは、単なる音楽史ではなく魂の旅路の記録です。バーンスタインの愛弟子として数多のタクトを振った彼が描くのは、古代から続く「感情の隠喩」としての音の物語。知識ではなく震えるような感覚としてクラシックを解き明かす筆致は、読者の耳を力強く開き、未知の感動へと誘います。 本書の白眉は、演奏体験を「再発見の儀式」と定義する詩的洞察にあります。文字を通じて旋律を色彩豊かな情景へ変容させる言葉の力は、まさに文学の極致。初心者には情熱を、愛好家には新たな視座を授ける本作は、日常に壮大な響きをもたらす、美しくも濃密な「音楽への恋文」なのです。