~~ The most important music critic in Paris, and also painfully honest: Hector Berlioz. Then, as today, critics were often snobs, social climbers, ignorant and incompetent. ~~ A lengthy section is devoted to Wagner whose entree was helped by Meyerbeer, yet Wagner accused him of bribing music critics. He loved his mistress, but needed his wife. "I would have married her," he once said, "but I could never have made love to her." ~~A moralist, Zola was faithful to his wife for many years and then set up a mistress nearby who gave him two children. Huysmans believed that Degas had a "disdain for the flesh." Degas admired the plain Mary Cassatt. "Why do you say Degas has trouble having an erection?" asked Van Gogh to a poet friend. Some of the players are Flaubert, the Goncourt Bros, Degas, Saint-Saens, Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Zola, Wagner and Rossini. Social intrigues, war, poverty, the celebration of great art, including Haussmann's redesign of Paris, are captured w excerpts from letters and diaries. Part of Manet's modernity was his subject matter: contemporary Parisian life that revealed the newly triumphant (but very insecure) bourgeoisie. Here's her "story," along w what happened to the model. Parisians loved paintings of Madonnas, nymphs and goddesses, but Manet (1832-1883) offered a demimondaine, or simply a modern Venus, coolly appraising you with casual indifference. With Manet's famous painting as a starting point, the accomplished writer Otto Friedrich takes readers on a time travel into the Second Empire of the 19thC. Part of Manet's modernity was his subject matter: contemporary Parisian life that Step into another time.
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