Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems by Vernon Duke instant download

Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems by Vernon Duke instant download

"Passport to Paris is one of the great neglected memoirs of the 20th-century arts. The cosmopolitan composer Vernon Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky, succeeded not only in living a mesmerizing life but also in telling his story with incomparable novelistic flair. A sampling of Duke's California poetry augments the allure of an essential republication."
—Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise and Wagnerism

"Passport to Paris would qualify as a legendary autobiography except that its long absence rendered it largely forgotten. Its reemergence amounts to a literary and musical correction. Amid accounts of eruptions and fashions on three continents, Vernon Duke explains his irregular ears and provides casual access to the Gershwins, a tingling snapshot of Ethel Waters's opening in Cabin in the Sky, two memorably bandaged fingers—pudgy in Diaghilev's case, worshipped in Stravinsky's—and a sentence that begins: 'Following mother's...