Recollections from My Life: An Autobiography by Adolph Bernhard Marx

This book was translated by Stephen Thomson Moore.

"At first glance, Marx's legal and musical careers are at variance; he himself makes it clear that his judicial work crowded out his music. But while the two appeared to pull in different directions, the conflict was in a sense creative: Marx the musician--or at least the particular type of musician he turned out to be--would have been unimaginable without Marx the lawyer. This sort of dynamic was evidently fundamental to Marx's character and method: one might be reminded here that Marx's notion of musical form was itself based in the energetic confrontation of rest and motion. If Marx's memoirs, therefore, come across as at times inconsistent, incoherent or inconclusive, that is an expression of the various competing forces that are at work in his personality. His attempts to express some of the contingency of the human experience result in a prose that can be seen as clumsy or garbled, but this is deeply eloquent of an era that was itself garbled, that was making itself anew with extraordinary vigor, and that was conscious of the complexity and conflict inherent in that process." --James Arnold (Introduction)

This book was originally published by Pendragon Press in 2016.