Out of Time: The Vexed Life of Georg Tintner [Paperback]

Georg Tintner is best known to music lovers for his stunning interpretations of Bruckner's symphonies recorded by Naxos in the 1990s. He was a man who lived and breathed music. Blessed with perfect pitch, at the age of nine he was the first Jew to join the Vienna Boys' Choir. Later, he became immersed in the concert life of the city, rubbing shoulders with Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern, and observing the great conductors of the age. But by the late 1930s Tintner had to flee and he eventually landed in Auckland, New Zealand. There could? have been no greater contrast for this gifted young musician, yet he started a new life there before moving on to Australia and, much later, to Canada.

Tintner's third wife and widow, Tanya, has documented the life of this uncompromising man and the result is a revealing window on to the artistic temperament from the person closest to him.Out of Timeis a must-read for everyone who believes in the discipline that excellence in the arts demands  and the pure joy it can bring.

[Tanya Tintner] gives us something considerably more than an honest efforta detailed coastline to Tintner's psychic continent, like those Spanish maps of the New World with frilly edges and vast, blankterra incognitainteriors. Such a job requires not only perception but a prose supple and clear enough to convey it. I found very little hand-waving here, not attempts to hide don't know behind obfuscation and mystical hot air. The biographer has put down her best reckoning of one of the most important people in her life.... Tintner's ... eccentricities gave rise to a host of wonderful anecdotes, and his career shows that high art doesn't belong exclusively to the Big Deals the art and hype industry shoves in front of us. A very great musician spent most of his life creating and fostering art in out-of-the-way places. This legacy is as powerful as the recordings and ultimately more influential. The recordings merely let the world at larlƒ1