Lebrecht is a music historian and award-winning novelist, whose non-fiction works include The Maestro Myth: Great conductors in pursuit of power (1997) and The Life and Death of Classical Music (2007). Predictably, he shows a close interest in composers and writers. Early on, he raises the question of his own authority. His answer is telling, claiming that he has a connection to the material, some of it being of ‘first-hand origin’. This inclusion of self is a frequent note, mostly enjoyable but one that some may find laboured.

Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921 (photograph by Ferdinand Schmutzer/Wikimedia Commons)

Lebrecht explores the impact upon the world of Jews like Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, and numerous others, alongside the Jewish nature of their thinking. He traces it to a Talmudic mode of analysis that is forever evaluating oppositional responses. Furthermore, he addresses ‘a current of existential angst’ experienced by Jews at this time, heightened after the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the twentieth century, which ‘reawakens a primal fear ... of their marginality’. This anxiety stimulates their ingenuity; for Jews, aware of their difference, radical thinking or creating becomes less risky. As a collective group, they have no elevated position from which they may fall.

Lebrecht has evidently been deliberating over these ideas for some years, as demonstrated in interviews. Like Sander L. Gilman in Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the hidden language of the Jews (1986), Lebrecht interrogates a recurring anti-Semitic slur: namely, that Jews are outsiders to the prevailing culture or Kultur. Jews, with their own language, are perceived as being incapable of speaking the nation’s mother tongue, whether it be German or French. Lebrecht argues that instead of being merely proficient in these cultural languages, many of these personalities revolutionised them in their words and music: Proust, Heinrich Heine, Felix Mendelssohn, Sarah Bernhardt, Arnold Schoenberg.

These notes of triumphalism erupt among tragic refrains. Arthur Koestler’s pessimistic judgement of 1946 – ‘Self-hatred is the Jew’s patriotism’ – haunts the book as a spectre. Unlike for Bernhardt and later Leonard Bernstein, two extravagantly proud Jews, the inner conflict plays out agonisingly for many of the subjects as an endless wrestling between self-repulsion and self-actualisation.

Lebrecht’s classical music blog, Slipped Disc, is widely read and highly contentious. The writer has professed that gossip is ‘the human comedy’, and its spirit animates Genius and Anxiety. Georges Bizet’s Carmen is likely to have been inspired by his Jewish wife, Geneviève Halévy, who, on remarrying after his death, reinvented herself into a literary salon host and counted Proust among her friends. Eliza Davis is a revelation. An English Jewish woman driven by pursuit of justice peppered with a healthy dose of chutzpah, she managed to precipitate a change of heart in Charles Dickens regarding the representation of Jews in his novels. Anecdotes are central to this book’s pleasure; one stores them away like bonbons.

Lebrecht’s partiality to certain figures like Gustav Mahler – about whom he has written two books and admits to being obsessed by – are countered by his antipathy to others such as Freud, and one suspects Hannah Arendt, who is reduced to her phrase ‘the banality of evil’. This can be tiresome. For the most part, those depicted are complex creatures with varied moral codes, eliciting empathy and disdain and many shades in between.

There is a staggering amount of material here, with an accompanying extensive bibliography. Characters jostle for space and demand more attention. At times, the subjects feel ill at ease with their fellow chapter companions. Formidably, though, Lebrecht has undertaken a century-long study of European Jewish civilisation, religious and secular, and the revolutions taking place within these communities amid broader historical events.

Genius and Anxiety teases the reader, inducing a desire to know more about Fanny Mendelssohn, Else Lasker-Schüler, and many others. If there was an accompanying musical score, it would not be played in the register of Schoenberg’s atonality but rather a mixture of Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘joyful vivacity’ and Bernstein’s openly Jewish scores, ‘straddling highbrow and low’. Genius and Anxiety is a love letter to Lebrecht’s heritage and to a world mostly lost and radically reconstituted. The fractured glass that appears as a motif can be witnessed in the contemporary rise of anti-Semitism. Lebrecht’s lament, ‘The sense of otherness is back’, makes sense when noting that he is English. For Jews of different origins, this positioning as Other has never really gone away.