Geniuses, Goddesses and People
by. Dutton, $3.50.
Once one of the most brilliant music critics of the fourth estate, Winthrop Sargeant, currently employed by Time, Inc., has brought together his various accounts of all kinds of people, most of which were done in the line of duty for Life magazine. The subjects of his straightto-the-point, blow-by-blow interviews include, among others, Toscanini, Joe Gatto (a former prize fighter turned painter), Rita Hayworth, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ezio Pinza, and Sir Thomas Beecham.
Here is how Mr. Sargeant gets at the character of a Toscanini performance: “The first to strike the listener is the impression of excitement and energy given off by the orchestra — something that has nothing to do with mere loudness or even with quality of tone — a sense of harnessed frenzy controlled with hair-trigger precision by the circular motions of his queer paddling beat. It is present even when the orchestra is playing its softest and most delicate passages, and in climaxes it becomes whipped into a furious, but still rigidly controlled, torrent of sound.” This passage is a fair example of Mr. Sargeant’s method: simple and vivid writing about complicated things.