MONDAY: Music critic in Amsterdam!

MONDAY, MARCH 2, 2026

Young music lover revealed: There was once a person who read a three-volume biographer of a famous composer and ended up writing this:

Everyone in the Annex except Mr. van Daan and Peter has read the Hungarian Rhapsody trilogy, a biography of the composer, piano virtuoso and child prodigy Franz Liszt. It's very interesting, though in my opinion there's a bit too much emphasis on women; Liszt was not only the greatest and most famous pianist of his time, he was also the biggest womanizer, even at the age of seventy. He had an affair with Countess Marie d' Agoult, Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, the dancer Lola Montez, the pianist Agnes Kingworth, the pianist Sophie Menter, the Circassian princess Olga Janina, Baroness Olga Meyen- dorff, actress Lilla what's-her-name, etc., etc., and there's no end to it. Those parts of the book dealing with music and the other arts are much more interesting... 

Yes, it's true! The writer was Anne Frank, then age 14, not long thereafter lost to the world thanks to the madness of that world, not long before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. 

Anthony Tommasini, the former chief classical music critic of The New York Times, remembered this matter in a labor of love in yesterday's print editions of the Times. Dual headline included:

In the Secret Annex, Anne Frank’s Radio and a Love for Classical Music
Her diary overflows with her devotion to books and movies. But after rereading the entries, a critic was struck by how often she writes about music.

[...]

In June 1944, three days before she turned 15, and two months before the annex was raided and everyone arrested—of the group, Otto Frank, Anne’s father, would be the only survivor of the camps—Anne wrote enthusiastically about “Hungarian Rhapsody,” a three-volume biography of Franz Liszt that she had just finished reading. “Its very interesting, though in my opinion there’s a bit too much emphasis on women,” she says about Liszt’s prodigious womanizing. But she was captivated by the parts “dealing with music and the other arts,” stories of Schumann, Clara Wieck, Berlioz, Chopin, Victor Hugo, Anton Rubinstein, Rossini and Mendelssohn.

It's true! There was once a reader of that three-volume biography who preferred the parts about the music! Continuing directly, Tommasini offers this:

There is a poignant entry from April 1944 when Anne bonds over Mozart with Peter, the van Pels’s teenage son. Peter, almost three years older than Anne, did not make a good first impression on her. She found him “a shy, awkward boy whose company won’t amount to much.” Those feelings took root. Peter was lazy, obnoxious, “a dope” and “no one takes Peter seriously,” she wrote. Eighteen months of annex confinement changed her feelings; Peter’s too. They became smitten and, with grudging parental indulgence, spent private time together in the attic of the annex. Peter gave Anne her first kiss.

One day, they were in the attic listening to a Mozart concert on the “baby radio,” as Anne called a portable set. She was especially struck by the serenade for strings “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” “I can hardly bear to listen in the kitchen,” she wrote, “since beautiful music stirs me to the very depths of my soul.”

Lost the world at age 15, thanks to the surrounding madness, with Peter van Pels lost too. Tommasini's rumination about his recent trip to Amsterdam continues:

The adolescent Anne’s growing immersion in classical music amid unimaginable hardships and daily fears preoccupied me during this trip to Amsterdam. Besides fulfilling a lifelong wish to visit the Anne Frank House, I went to concerts by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Netherlands Philharmonic, both at the acoustically marvelous Concertgebouw hall, built in the late 19th century. Anne, I thought, would have loved these performances.

It’s unlikely, though, that she ever made it to an orchestra program at the Concertgebouw. By 1941, when she was 11, Jews were barred from theaters of all kinds, along with libraries, museums, parks and more. By 13, she was in hiding. 

If you missed Tommasini rumination, you might want to consult it today. Amazingly, there were people who risked their lives, not just to provide their neighbors with food, but also to bring them books:

"Our meals consist almost entirely of potatoes and imitation gravy,” Anne wrote in her diary one day in 1944. But even during periods when food has hard to procure, the people risking their lives to provide for and shelter these hidden Jews—all employees of Otto’s pectin, spice and jam business—were able to bring them books: used books, library books, their own books, which were eagerly passed around.

Tommasini had "reread Anne Frank’s extraordinary diary before" his trip to Amsterdam. He "had somehow forgotten how regularly she brings up classical music."

We ourselves remain indebted to Francine Prose for her 2009 book, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, which vastly deepened our understanding of this remarkable episode in our human history.

As happenstance had it, Anne Frank happened to be a precocious child; Prose felt she had never received her due as a brilliant developing writer. Prose also tells the antique myth adjacent story of how Anne Frank's diary, and her other writings, escaped the fate of being lost at the time of her family's arrest. 

It's a story right out of antiquity, as Prose correctly notes.