This selection of Walser's essays, poems and short stories touching on the subject of music caught my eye particularly because I was curious to find out more about Walser's influence on Thomas Bernhard, for whom the relationship between literature and music was enormously important. In that sense, I'm not sure if it really answered any more questions than it raised, and in some ways it turned out to be a frustratingly random selection. Its real raison-d'etre as a book seems to be to act as a set of illustrations to the extended essay on Walser and Music by Brodbeck and Sorg that closes the book. Which is interesting, but doesn't really make it a book with wide general appeal. All the material is already published elsewhere, they haven't included any previously unknown texts.

The conclusion seems to be that Walser had a rather ambivalent relationship with music. Unlike Bernhard, he wasn't musically trained, and he didn't have any composers or performers in his circle of friends. He obviously did find music enormously important, and - not as much as Bernhard, but still conspicuously - he uses structures and patterns derived from music in a lot of his writing. But he clearly has a strong negative feeling about the bourgeois glorification of art-music and its performance - in the pieces collected here he is often very sarcastic about trained performers, concerts, and drawing-room music. He loves the accordion (which he confusingly refers to by his own word, Handharfe, hand-harp), but he mocks opera singers and virtuosi as much as he teases middle-class daughters-who-play. He seems to be passionate about opera, especially Mozart, but he doesn't quite like to admit to it: there are several essays in this collection where he comically tears apart the plot of an opera whilst clearly having a very intimate knowledge of its music. Whenever he is writing about a performance and detects himself getting sentimental about music, he changes the subject and tells us about how he is using the opportunity to make love to the servant-girl sitting next to him in the gallery. Or he damps our ardour and takes us back to the real world with a sentence saying something like "after the concert, it is usual to go home as quickly as possible, sometimes stopping for refreshment at a café on the way". ( )