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Lost in the Stars: The Forgotten Musical Life of Alexander Siloti.

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By Charles F. Barber. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. [xix, 429 p. ISBN 0-8108-4108-8. $49.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, discograpy, personalia, index, compact disc.

The Weimar studio of Franz Liszt attracted untold numbers of aspiring pianists in the 1880s. Liszt then had an "open-door, no-charge" policy for teaching, and the students that came ranged widely in talent. As Harold Schonberg has written, most "were auditors who might have played for him once or twice, and then went home to hang out shingles advertising themselves as Liszt pupils ... But mixed among the hangers-on was a group of titans who went on to careers that lasted well into the twentieth century" (The Great Pianists [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987], 181). Among those coached by Liszt in the 1880s were Eugen d'Albert, Arthur Friedheim, Frederic Lamond, Jose Vianna da Motta, Alfred Reisenauer, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil yon Sauer, and Alexander Siloti.

As with so many of the great Russian pianists, Siloti was Ukrainian, born in 1863. He went to Moscow at the age of eight and began his formal studies in music. His teachers included Nicolay Zverev, Nikolay Rubinstein, Sergey Taneyev, and Tchaikovsky; he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1881 with a gold medal in piano. Siloti traveled to Weimar in 1883 and remained in Germany after Liszt's death in 1886, cofounding the Liszt Society in Leipzig. Along with other...

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