Motifs of Reminiscence: Mike Ashman enjoys a trio of artists’ memoirs

Despite varying approaches to authorship, presentation and scholarship, these three books present information hard to obtain elsewhere and avoid the habitual cloying boundaries of reminiscences by family and friends.

Nora London, George’s widow, is not an experienced writer, but she has a good nose for a telling anecdote, and is not afraid to spell out the self-effacements confronting ‘the artist’s wife’ on the road with a touring international singer. Her account of her husband’s illness-plagued last years avoids sentimentality. There are useful snapshots of Viennese opera coming back to life after the war (the cradle of London’s career) and of Wieland Wagner and the beginnings of New Bayreuth. A story about the latter adds another chapter to the grim tragicomedy of racial prejudice in Wagner performance.