![]() ![]() The writer needed but a few steps to reach the instrument and bang away on the “Tristan” chord to get in the proper mood while writing “Doctor Faustus,” Mann’s controversial late novel about the role of music and art in society. Donated by his favorite grandson, Frido Mann, the piano now sits in the exact place where it had been between 19, in a family room outside of Mann’s study in the Thomas Mann House. ![]() It's Mann’s piano, which spent the last 70 years in Europe, and it has come home. What it witnessed could, itself, be material for a novel. One of them that Toíbín leaves out stood at the very center of these gatherings in the house. and his house in Brentwood a center of intellectual life, full of exceptional figures. The German Nobel Prize laureate was at the time the most celebrated writer in L.A. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)Īmong 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. Igor Levit plays piano for an audience that includes critic Alex Ross, in the black mask, and Frido Mann, Thomas Mann's grandson, wearing the blue mask, in the first performance on Thomas Mann's piano after its return from Europe after 70 years.
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