Today Ken posted a lengthy piece, ostensibly about writer Hans Fantel, at Down With Tyranny. The connection to tyranny isn't as powerful as the connection to Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler or Richard Wagner's Meistersinger- and the power of the piece, and the reason I'm recommending it, goes well beyond any of that. You'll have to click on the link above to read the entire piece- you should- but here's Ken's introduction:Here I've been going on for years about this astounding but now-lost piece of writing from a Sunday NYT Arts & Leisure section of many moons ago, of which my yellowed copy had long since given up the ghost. I've probably tried to talk about it to everyone I know, possibly even stopped strangers in the street and harangued them. I remembered it always as perhaps the single most beautiful and powerful piece of writing I've read.I remember vividly how it appeared: It was Hans Fantel's weekly "Sound" column, and it appeared on the classical-music page of the closest-to-Christmas Sunday Arts & Leisure section, sandwiched between the "year end" bloviating of Don Henahan (live music) on one side and John Rockwell (recordings) on the other.Most NYT (and Stereo Review) readers of those years thought of Hans as a polite shill for the audio industry, who never heard a piece of equipment he didn't like. That wasn't really fair, but it was understandable. I didn't know him well, but in my years as music editor of High Fidelity, where I was the only editor based in New York and therefore represented the magazine at all sorts of press gatherings in the city, I ran into him frequently, and knew him as the sweetest and courtliest person imaginable.Only occasionally in his writing did you get a glimpse of where he had come from: arriving in New York during World War II as a solitary refugee, speaking no English, having survived as a fugitive in Europe for an extended period--with his whole family having vanished. From these occasional references it was possible to piece together an image of sorts of the Fantel family as it had been, and in particular his father, who seems to have been the very model of a cultured Viennese burger, to whom culture wasn't a frill but a necessity of life.One detail I always remembered, which Hans worked into a column that included a mention of the Turnabout LP reissue of the pioneering 1938 recording of Mahler's Ninth Symphony. In those days-- long before the introduction of long-playing records-- the piece, running upwards of an hour and a half, was rarely performed and must have seemed a most improbable candidate for recording. Audaciously, His Master's Voice (HMV, later part of EMI) made this recording during a live performance by Bruno Walter (seen here at about this time) and the Vienna Philharmonic, which turned out to be Walter's last performance with the orchestra until after the Third Reich had crumbled.Hans mentioned that he had attended that concert as a teenager--taken, of course, by his father.But enough babbling. An e-mail that set me to thinking about Hans's reference to the Mahler Ninth performance got me to thinking about that other piece, and whether it might not be recoverable after all. So I rattled the Sen. Ted Stevens Memorial InterTubes, and in a matter of minutes, there it was. In the process I also unearthed an earlier piece of Hans's I'd never read, from 1980, also a Christmas memory, this one from the time he lived in hiding on a remote farm in Slovakia, again culminating in a moment of musical transcendence.Again, the link-- to Fantel's truly inspiring column from 1982, all most of us will ever need to know about Hans Sachs and Act III of Die Meistersinger, and the story of Bruno Walter's 1938 Vienna performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Das Lied Von Der Erde.