Oskar Bie

In his text, Oscar Bie, himself a well-known music critic, wants to parallel Eugen Spiro's portraits of musicians with general, textual descriptions of a concert's atmosphere. He describes the behaviour and role of artists, their dress attire, the orchestra, the audience, the (cursed) programme booklet, the interval, the kinds of applause, even the music critics and their habit of choosing seats they can leave in a hurry because they want to cover as many as ten concerts in one evening. The text is interspersed with Spiro's [smaller lithographs]. Twenty-four of Spiro's lithographs of musicians are [full-page size]and often carry the virtuoso's signature: singers, pianists (e.g. Arthur Schnabel), conductors (e.g. Bruno Walter, Richard Strauss), cellists (Hugo Becker), and many violinists (Fritz Kreisler, Adolf Busch, Bronisław Hubermann, Franz von Vescey, Emil Telmányi, Carl Flesch).