Thomas Mann's magic piano, heart of 1940s L.A. intellectual life, comes home
Among the disappointments of Colm Toíbín’s new novel, “The Magician,” which imagines the life of Thomas Mann, is any real sense of the richly extravagant artistic life of the émigré community in 1940s Los Angeles. The German Nobel Prize laureate was at the time the most celebrated writer in L.A. and his house in Brentwood a center of intellectual life, full of exceptional figures.
To this day, we cannot escape Mann connections with our musical landscape. Mann’s youngest son and Frido’s father, Michael, was a violist in the San Francisco Symphony at the time he obtained the piano for his father. Stravinsky wrote his solo viola “Elegy” for him. It happened to be the piece to open this year’s Ojai Music Festival as an apt reminder of 18 sorrowful pandemic months.
Frido Mann, himself a distinguished writer who was trained as a musician and psychologist, inherited the piano from his grandmother in 1980. It followed him throughout Switzerland, Italy and Germany. He played it daily, and it held memories.
The instrument is an unimpressive Wheelock baby grand. Once a popular American piano, known as a poor man’s Steinway, Wheelocks don’t have much of a reputation these days. You can pick one up on the used market for a small fraction of the price of a Steinway. Before the concert I askedIf so, either Levit is a magician or “The Magician” built himself L.A.'s first magic castle. Levit’s performances of Opus 111 as well as of Beethoven’s first piano sonata, Opus 2, No.
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