Alice Sokoloff (1912–2006)
Author of Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway
About the Author
Works by Alice Sokoloff
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Sokoloff, Alice
- Legal name
- Sokoloff, Alice Hunt
- Birthdate
- 1912-06-03
- Date of death
- 2006-04-29
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Radcliffe College
- Occupations
- composer
biographer
music critic
musician - Short biography
- Alice Sokoloff, née Hunt, was born in New York City, the daughter of Dr. James Ramsay Hunt, a prominent professor of neurology at Columbia University and his wife Alice St. John Nolan. She grew up learning to speak several languages and entered Radcliffe College at age 16. Due to financial difficulties caused by the Depression, she left college after her freshman year and worked as a researcher and writer. She was also a pianist and eventually studied composition and began to compose music, including a symphony, some shorter orchestral pieces, three string quartets and works for solo instruments and various chamber groups. She wrote music criticism and reviews for various newspapers for 25 years.
She married Boris Sokoloff, an émigré scientist and intellectual from Russia, with whom she had a son. She edited most of her husband's 27 books. She wrote three biographies, Cosima Wagner, Extraordinary Daughter of Franz Liszt; Kate Chase for the Defense; and Hadley, the First Mrs. Hemingway. She met Hadley Richardson (later Mowrer), who was a neighbor in New Hampshire through Hadley’s niece, who was also Alice’s friend. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- New York, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- Sun Valley, Idaho, USA
Chocorua, New Hampshire, USA
Katonah, New York, USA - Place of death
- Sun Valley, Idaho, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Daughter of Franz Listz, wife of renowned conductor and pianist Hans von Bulow, then mistress and second wife of Richard Wagner, muse of Friedrich Nietzsche. . . and that's just the first forty years of the life of Cosima Wagner (1837-1930).
This biography is almost entirely concerned with Cosima's first forty years. It barely covers the second (and probably more interesting) half of Cosima's life, in which - for better and for worse - she was her own woman, not daughter, wife, mistress, or show more muse, but ruthless and relentless guardian of Wagner's legacy and of the Bayreuth shrine and festival, where she surrounded herself with loyal Wagnerites, passionate nationalists, unabashed racists, and, in the 1920s, Nazis. There's no mention of anti-semitism in this book, so it's rather obviously a whitewash, but Cosima's life in her first forty years was fascinating enough and the details are so quintessentially a product of the romantic era that I can accept the biography for what it is.
A representative passage: "It is not surprising that Cosima was ready to go to any extreme through her love for Wagner. She had a strong and passionate nature that had been denied much of its normal expression through a difficult and deprived childhood. She had suffered humiliations of rejection by her parents. She had been made to feel the anomaly of her position as an illegitimate child by many people. . . When a woman of strong will and superior intelligence falls in love, she is very apt to go to extremes of devotion especially if she feels that the man with whom she is in love is superior to her in every sense, that he is someone to whom she can look up and who will challenge and engage every facet of her personality. In such a case, and with such a woman. she becomes an instrument of the man's destiny; the world exists only for him and through him everything becomes relative only to him; right and wrong, morality and immorality, honor and dishonor are real only in so far as they affect him. A whole new code of behavior and judgment comes into being wherein the first duty is toward the beloved and any means are allowed to this end." show less
This biography is almost entirely concerned with Cosima's first forty years. It barely covers the second (and probably more interesting) half of Cosima's life, in which - for better and for worse - she was her own woman, not daughter, wife, mistress, or show more muse, but ruthless and relentless guardian of Wagner's legacy and of the Bayreuth shrine and festival, where she surrounded herself with loyal Wagnerites, passionate nationalists, unabashed racists, and, in the 1920s, Nazis. There's no mention of anti-semitism in this book, so it's rather obviously a whitewash, but Cosima's life in her first forty years was fascinating enough and the details are so quintessentially a product of the romantic era that I can accept the biography for what it is.
A representative passage: "It is not surprising that Cosima was ready to go to any extreme through her love for Wagner. She had a strong and passionate nature that had been denied much of its normal expression through a difficult and deprived childhood. She had suffered humiliations of rejection by her parents. She had been made to feel the anomaly of her position as an illegitimate child by many people. . . When a woman of strong will and superior intelligence falls in love, she is very apt to go to extremes of devotion especially if she feels that the man with whom she is in love is superior to her in every sense, that he is someone to whom she can look up and who will challenge and engage every facet of her personality. In such a case, and with such a woman. she becomes an instrument of the man's destiny; the world exists only for him and through him everything becomes relative only to him; right and wrong, morality and immorality, honor and dishonor are real only in so far as they affect him. A whole new code of behavior and judgment comes into being wherein the first duty is toward the beloved and any means are allowed to this end." show less
Statistics
- Works
- 5
- Members
- 49
- Popularity
- #320,874
- Rating
- 3.4
- Reviews
- 2
- ISBNs
- 5
- Languages
- 1