Out of Time

Conductor and composer Georg Tintner lived and breathed music. Tintner is best known to music lovers for his stunning interpretations of Bruckner's symphonies, recorded by Naxos in the 1990s. His long and eventful career began at the age of eight, when he was the first Jew to join the Vienna Boys Choir. In this most musical of cities, Tintner was part of the same audience as Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern, and he often saw the likes of Furtwangler, Toscanini, and Klemperer at work. But, by 1938, due to the persecution of Jews, he had to flee, eventually ending up in New Zealand. This could not have been more of a contrast for this musically gifted young man, yet he started a new life there before moving to Australia and, much later, to Canada. Often regarded by his colleagues as eccentric, Georg Tintner was a vegan well before it was fashionable to be so. He was also stunningly ill-equipped to deal with the arts bureaucracy which shamefully ignored what Norman Lebrecht calls "his unarguable gifts" until a few years before his death. In this book, Tanya Tintner, Georg's third wife, explores the privations that her husband, a true vessel for art, had to confront to survive in the modern world. Out of Time is a must-read for anyone who believes in the discipline and hard work that creativity demands, the transformative power of music, and the pure joy it can bring.