Harvey Sachs

I've written five books of my own (biographies of Toscanini and Arthur Rubinstein, two collections of essays, and the history book Music in Fascist Italy, co-authored;Placido Domingo's My First Forty Years and Sir Georg Solti's Memoirs (called Solti on Solti in the UK), and edited and translated The Letters of Arturo Toscanini; my new book, The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, will be published in the spring of 2010 by Random House in the US and by Faber & Faber in the UK.   I've also published over six hundred other pieces, ranging from CD liner notes to articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and from essays in the Times Literary Supplement (London) and Yale Review to profiles in the New Yorker, in addition to having done much radio work and two television documentaries (the second one, "Toscanini in His Own Words", was nominated for a 2009 Gemini Award in Canada). I've done much translating, too, and have lectured at schools, universities, and cultural institutions all over North America and Europe. From 2004 to 2006 I was Artistic Director of the Societa del Quartetto di Milano, Italy's oldest extant concert organization (founded 1864), which engages world-famous recitalists, chamber and early music ensembles, and occasionally major symphony orchestras.  I am on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where, during the 2009-10 academic year, I am teaching courses in History of Opera and History of Singing and a seminar on "Late Beethoven".

 I've lived a frequently unsettled life in a variety of places: Cleveland (I was born and grew up there); New York (I lived there as a student and have been residing there again since 2006); Toronto; Peterborough, Ontario; Milan; London; two Tuscan villages in the province of Arezzo (my twenty-five-year-old son and eleven-year-old daughter were born in Tuscany); and Lugano, Switzerland - from a minimum of three to a maximum of twenty years in each of them. I've observed life in general and musical/cultural life in particular in each location and have given as much thought as I've been capable of giving to what I've observed. I hope that this blog will demonstrate - to myself as well as to others - that endless traipsing around can have some positive aspects in addition to the obvious negative ones. In any case, I want this to be an informal, stimulating forum, and I look forward to meeting my readers electronically.