Böcker av Alessandra Comini

In Switzerland, Germany, and Vienna a spate of grave vandalism, graffiti, and even murder concerning 19th century musicians Clara and Robert Schumann is investigated by Megan Crespi.

"In Vienna, upsetting mishaps occur when a Bruckner/Brahms four-part concert series under the baton of a woman conductor turns deadly"--

A moving van filled with eleven Wassily Kandinsky paintings stolen from Munich's famous Lenbach House Museum during a violent neo-Nazi demonstration is hijacked in Slovakia. Two rival Kandinsky collectors appear to be involved: Igor Rasputin of Odessa, visiting in Munich, and Boris Zima of Moscow, whose agent Raisa Sokolova is keeping tabs on Rasputin. Puzzlingly, the museum adamantly declares there has been no theft, even though its night watchman has been found murdered. Also visiting Munich is retired art history professor Megan Crespi, slated to give a lecture she titles, curiously enough, "Double Kandinsky." In between visits to "mad" King Ludwig's fantasy castles, Megan comes into contact with possible suspects, ranging from Rasputin to Iris and Laszlo Togarassy, owners of Munich's new The Blue Rider gallery featuring Kandinsky's works, to Katrina Keller, associate director of the Lenbach. Manipulating events connected with the theft are a young, careless gambler who owns a building behind the Lenbach, two men from the Ukrainian island of Amiinyi-one a computer wizard, the other a science photographer-and their Munich engineer friend Alyksandr Miesel, neo-Nazi leader Walter Krankenhauer, and Detective Dieter Löser. Crespi's lecture, including results of state-of-the-art XRF technology, becomes the revelatory preamble to a thrilling denouement that cracks the Kandinsky conundrum.Includes a Readers Guide.

Researching for her book on 19th-century virtuoso pianist Clara Schumann and her eight children, Professor Megan Crespi encounters startling hatred or praise for them and for Clara's composer husband Robert. These strong reactions come in the form of grave vandalism, outrageous graffiti on Schumann museums across Germany, in Switzerland and Vienna, and even murder. Why? Megan's travel companion is her sister-in-law Susan, a pediatrician whose expertise becomes crucial for the thirteen-year-old Italian child prodigy Stella Scarpauomo, referred to by the press as "the twenty-first-century Clara Schumann." Disparate characters include three dedicated detectives, two Viennese widows who are founders of the local Clara Schumann Society, and two Schumann museum directors, one helpful, the other easily annoyed. Also involved are a wacky Schumann archivist, a patroness of the arts who refuses to use one of her two surnames, and a brilliant young pianist from Liberia whose promising career has veered from that of performing artist to assistant piano tuner. Will Crespi and the detectives put the dangerous jigsaw puzzle together before further disaster strikes? Includes Readers Guide.

During a performance of Beethoven's Fidelio at the Vienna State Opera there is an explosion in the foyer just off the auditorium. Auguste Rodin's famous 1909 bronze bust of composer/conductor Gustav Mahler has been blown up and a hate-filled note has been left at the scene demanding that there be "no more Jews defiling our culture." Retired art historian/musicologist Megan Crespi, in Vienna to lecture, is at the performance with her former student, the renowned cellist Egga Streicher, and is asked by her friend, Chief of Police Erich Decker, to help in tracking down the culprit. Soon copy-cat vandalism of Jewish monuments around the city breaks out. Things come to a horrendous climax during a performance of Mahler's great Second Symphony, the "Resurrection" symphony, but is it the only surprise awaiting Megan Crespi's dangerous investigation? Includes Readers Guide.

Two monumental granite statues by famed German artist Kathe Kollwitz-the Grieving Parents-have been stolen from a World War I soldiers' cemetery in Belgium. What could the motive have been for such an unlikely theft? On a visit to the director of the Kollwitz Museum in Cologne, retired art history professor and Kollwitz scholar Megan Crespi is asked to aid in tracking down the robber or robbers. As she pursues clues and visits possible suspects more Kollwitz statues are stolen in Cologne and Berlin. Crespi's itinerary takes her to the Berlin Kollwitz Museum, Weimar, the Baltic Sea island of Rugen, Greifswald, and finally to the Kollwitz House in Moritzburg. On the way she interacts with physicians Abraham Ruckgabe and Iliana Frankel, the just-married couple Monika von Putbus and Akram al-Aljamie, and unscrupulous CEO of Rugen's asbestos-contaminated Dorotek factory, Reinhold Fromm, collector of dominatrix drawings. We meet possible suspects, Iranian prince Yusri Pahlavi, greedy Lukas Zamann of the Galerie Zamann, and the mysterious "e;Marie Schmidt,"e; of Moritzburg, Kollwitz's final home. All seem to be connected to the spate of Kollwitz thefts. Can Crespi solve these thefts and will the precious artworks be found? An unexpected denouement involving seven persons and two cats gives us the answer.

Overflowing with passion for her work as a scholar and teacher, Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, Alessandra Comini reminisces through six decades as an unconventional art historian in this illustrated memoir. The author of award-winning books on Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Ludwig van Beethoven, Comini draws on her sixty years of daily journals, sharing research-related anecdotes as she reflects on the formation and flowering of her distinguished career. Beginning with her colorful background as a refugee from Franco's Spain, then Mussolini's Italy, she describes her music-loving family's sometimes humorous, sometimes painful adjustment to a World War II Texas. A series of fortuitous experiences at Interlochen's National Music Camp, Barnard College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia University later leads to what would ultimately be a turning point in her life as well as in Schiele scholarship. She discovered the actual cell in which Schiele had been imprisoned in a provincial Austrian jail half a century earlier. Comini invites readers to join her in the same zestful and persistent pursuit of cultural history that has repeatedly earned her the honor of being voted "e;outstanding"e; professor, by her students at Columbia University and later at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Her research and quests take the reader around the world and back. From the islands of Corfu, Madeira, Rugen, and Tahiti to the cities of Lisbon, Rome, Oslo, and St. Petersburg, Comini pursues such diverse and distinctive personalities as Rosa Bonheur, Gustav and Alma Mahler, Pablo Picasso, Eleonora Duse, Edvard Munch, Kathe Kollwitz, Vaslav Nijinski, and Egon Schiele. Alessandra Comini's memoir will inspire readers with its sincere and compelling account of an extraordinary life and career still passionately in progress. Retirement for her has meant discovering a joyful new profession: writing art history murder mystery novels that take her eighty-year-old pseudonymous heroine Megan Crespi from the top of Europe down to Antarctica in pursuit of murderous purloiners of artworks by Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Munch, and Kollwitz.

In this third book in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, a major double portrait by the Viennese Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka showing himself with his lover Alma Mahler has been stolen from the Basel Museum in Switzerland. Left in its place is an exact duplicate, except that Alma has been replaced by an unknown woman. Retired professor of art history Megan Crespi, an expert on Viennese art, is called in to help with the investigation. Then, a second theft of fourteen crates of unknown Kokoschka artworks from a Viennese storage vault takes Megan to Vienna. There she meets by accident the mysterious multimillionaire Desdemona Dumba. A stunning anorexic, Desdemona feels it is her role in life to bring Kokoschka's lost works together and away from public scrutiny. Meanwhile, two individuals, Leo Lang and Bruno Fichte-Mahler, harbor fanatical interest in Kokoschka and go to extreme measures either to desecrate or to protect the artist's images of Alma. An endangered Megan pursues leads that take her from Basel and Vienna to Berlin and finally to Xenia, Desdemona's remote islet off the Greek island of Corfu. Includes Readers Guide. Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, ALESSANDRA COMINI was awarded Austria's Grand Medal of Honor for her books on Viennese artists Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Her "Egon Schiele's Portraits" was nominated for the National Book Award and her "The Changing Image of Beethoven" is used in classrooms around the country. Both in new editions are now available from Sunstone Press. Comini's travels, recorded in her memoir, "In Passionate Pursuit," extend from Europe to Antarctica and are reflected in her second mystery novel in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, "The Schiele Slaughters." It, and the first in the series, "Killing for Klimt," were also published by Sunstone Press.

This book accompanies a major exhibition devoted to portraits created by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, whose figurative work exhibits intense emotion and technical brilliance.