Emanuel Feuermann
London music critic Morreau has produced a fine account of the  life and legacy of cellist Emanuel Feuermann. Born in 1902 into  a poor Jewish family in Austria, Feuermann was thought by many  to be a better cellist than Pablo Casals, but his life was cut  short at the age of 39 during a somewhat mysterious botched  operation. As a youth, Feuermann struggled to find a place in  his father's heart and in the world of the Reifenbergs of  Cologne, upper-class Jews who had been baptized and whose  youngest daughter Feuermann eventually married. Morreau is  especially good at describing Feuermann's cultural milieu and  the uncertainties and complexities inherent in climbing the  social ladder. In fact, because the cellist married outside of  his caste, his parents and his wife's parents never met, and the  book's one drawback is that Morreau does not examine as  completely as one would like the extent to which her subject  consciously "put aside" his birth family. The book includes a  chapter on Feuermann's writing, teaching, and performing, as  well as two chapters on his recorded legacy. Three appendixes  (listing Feuermann's fees, instruments and strings, and known  recordings) round out the text. Seymour Itzkoff's Emanuel  Feuermann, Virtuoso: A Biography (1979) contains many  interesting sidelights, but Morreau's account is fully  attributed and will be the standard biography. Highly  recommended for large public and academic libraries and  libraries interested in classical music. (Accompanying CD not  available for review.)-Bruce R. Schueneman, Texas A&M; Univ.  Lib., KingsvilleCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.