Novels, films, pictures, compositions are sometimes not finished.

You may barely get beyond a plan or sketch, get stuck early.

Or they are pushed a long way, only to get stuck at some point.

For internal reasons or also because of external hindrances.

Death naturally plays a prominent role among the latter, but they can also take on studio bosses or other financiers, for example, and intervene in countless other perils.

The inner reasons, in the developing work or in its initial idea, may be more interesting.

Less exposed to chance.

But one must not assume that they can always be separated cleanly from the adverse circumstances.

Helmut Mayer

Editor in the features section, responsible for “New Non-Fiction Books”.

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That is one of the insights to be gained incidentally when reading the book that Thomas von Steinaecker has left behind or, as the subtitle puts it a bit more full-bodied, dedicated to failed works of art.

Although a kind of systematic of the reasons for prevention, as appealing as the considerations about it are, ultimately does not matter to him at all.

The book lives from the works or work projects it draws on.

Literature and film, pop and classical music, old masters and avant-garde, comics and architecture are represented, and the registers are mixed.

Precisely worked, formulated tactfully

You come across Michelangelo and Leonardo, Musil and Hölderlin, the early Romantics and Schubert, the curse of the Ninth Symphony and Menzel's abandoned pictures, Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, the Beach Boys and Ligeti, Fellini and Visconti, Doderer and Arno Schmidt, Kafka of course and Karl May, Cage and Puccini, Hitchcock and Verhoeven, Ernst Jünger and Bruce Lee - and that is only a selection of the artists covered.

Quite a motley, as it would correspond to the inexhaustible object, it is not arranged chronologically, but roughly brought under four headings, which are: utopias, death, megalomania, chance possibly.

If you dig deeper into the collected "cases", they do not form a really clear typology.

Death is sometimes, but by no means always, the decisive sudden crack;

and if it is, it could actually also be classified as a sub-chapter under chance;

Utopia, on the other hand, maintains a soft border with megalomania.

Invitation to excursions

This is not an objection, especially since von Steinaecker also explicitly deals with what the observation of art from the Romantic period upwards contributed to driving out death of its randomness and to capitalizing on it for artist profiles. Rather, it shows that the independent life of the widely scattered "cases" is decisive, the stories that the author tells of them. And these little essays are consistently impressive. They are concise, precisely worked out, formulated with tact and tact. You don't even have to go into every detail, but at least take your hat off to such concise representations, which are housed in a tight space, are rich in material and are also entertaining to read.

So you learn a lot by reading it, remembering one thing, looking up another for the first time. Or just: hears and looks at it; as far as possible, because among the most interesting cases there are also those in which there was almost no legacy. It is a quality of the book that the representation does not push itself in front of its objects, but makes you want to go on many excursions. They will look different depending on the reader. The reviewer, for example, ended up with recordings of Schubert's Seventh and “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys (really an “extremely complex vocal arrangement”?) And Luciano Berio's finale of “Turandot”, with film snippets from Hitchcock's “Kaleidoscope” and Orson Welles, when leafing through Hölderlin and Doderer or when resolving to take a stand in front of Elsheimer's “Flight to Egypt” again.

Pretty much any choice, of course. Just like the one made by the author depends on preferences. But by no means only, because it has canonical aspects in view and is rich enough that the range of variations of very different open endings is represented, including the question that arises at the margins of what the definitive, final version is all about, which banishes all dangers or temptations of the open end. A question that is sometimes banal, but also - von Steinaecker shows it in the (almost) endless posthumous history of famous songs and albums in the field of pop - holds surprises in store. In any case, however, the following applies: The truly unsurpassable work is the one that did not come about.

Thomas von Steinaecker: "End open".

The book of failed works of art.

S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2021. 604 pp., Ill., Hardcover, € 35.