The diary includes 36 drawings of Jerusalem by the author’s widow, Milein Cosman, and is edited by Christopher Wintle (King’s College London) and Fiona Williams (BBC Symphony Orchestra Library). The publication has been made possible through the financial assistance of the Hans Keller Trust (Chairman, Donald Mitchell, CBE) and is supported by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library (home to the Hans Keller Archive). The printers are CPI Bookcraft, Midsomer Norton (Bath). The prize was presented by Dame Joan Sutherland at the end of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s annual dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, London on 8 May in a ceremony hosted by Sir Thomas Allen.
This remarkable book was described by its celebrated and controversial Viennese émigré author Hans Keller (1919-85) as ‘an anti-diary’; and it is in effect an intellectual autobiography of a kind as well as a lively riposte to Saul Bellow’s (‘subjournalistic and yes, intellectually irresponsible’) To Jerusalem and Back. It was written on BBC schedules, artists’ drawing blocks and table napkins during two stays at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim, an artists’ residence in Jerusalem. But after it had been transcribed in the late 1980’s, leading publishers deemed it ‘unprintable’ for its having dared to dissolve the boundaries between art and life: indeed, the book is not just confined to Music, or Society, or Politics, but blends all three into an astute and witty account of a crucial period in the recent history of Israel when the country swung sharply to the Right.
Doug McKenzie
First reactions to the book have been forthright and positive. The late Anthony Storr (University of Oxford) said, ‘I know of no one who remained more “his own man” than Hans, and I salute him for it. Lively, critical, irreverent, enthusiastic, and sceptical, The Jerusalem Diary (1977 and 1979) is as topical today as when it was written’; Norman Lebrecht, writing in the Jewish Chronicle, claimed, ‘there are few polemicists who can make us wince and laugh 16 years after their death. Keller is irreplaceable, his Jerusalem diary a treasure’; and Julia Neuburger, speaking on Radio 3’s Music Matters, described Cosman’s drawings as ‘absolutely wonderful’.
The Royal Philharmonic Society citation, reproduced in the BBC Music Magazine, June 2002, deemed The Jerusalem Diary to be ‘outstanding both for the profusion and originality of its musical ideas and for its powerful, idiosyncratic linguistic energy. The book teems with insights on other subjects, most prominently the politics of the young state of Israel. The jury admired, too, the way in which, for Keller, music becomes an intellectual force informing all other disciplines. Music was evidently to him what poetry was to Wordsworth, “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” ’.
The book follows an international Hans Keller conference held at the Arnold Schoenberg Centre, Vienna in April 2001. Later this year, Plumbago will publish a companion volume supported by a Millennium Commission Award: Hans Keller, Transposing Culture. Music, Society, and Psychology, 1940-52, with drawings by Milein Cosman, and edited by Christopher Wintle.
Hans Keller. The Jerusalem Diary:
- introduction
- publication details
- illustrated excerpts from the diary
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the book’s launch event, 17th October
2001
- Press Release: Royal Philharmonic Society Book of the Year, 2001