Tower of Ivory

John Ordham, a young Englishman in Munich, falls under the spell of Margarethe Styr, the singer the whole city worships in the years when Wagner had hardly a foothold outside Germany — while other people make quite other plans for him. Atherton knew the Munich of the opera house and the court at first hand and wrote it with an outsider's precision; the book is about what art demands of the artist, and what a great name demands of the man who inherits it. Fifty-three plates, among them Hampstead Heath views by John Constable, trace the landscapes and city streets that frame this story of art, ambition, and the pull of place.