For three or four decades after the Second World War, musical thinking in Britain was dominated by psychology. Among the earliest of the musical Freudians was Hans Keller (1919-85), an émigré from Vienna. For his case studies Keller drew on composers, performers, listeners and critics; and for his general topics he turned to opera, film music, creative character, genius, aesthetics and the issues of everyday musical life. The writing is impressive for its novelty, its insights, and the communicative clarity of its prose. The book includes a large number of aphorisms, two stories and a one-act play on British anti-Semitism. Most of the writings appear here in print for the first time and are drawn from papers held in the Hans Keller Archive at the University Library in Cambridge.

This new novel extends Koch's achievements in his previous novels and takes the reader to Koch's native Germany. Set in Weimar and Frankfurt in Germany, in the pivotal years 1927 and 1928, the novel is triggered the International Music Exhibition of 1927 "The Summer of Music. The reader is introduced to three main characters: Hanni Geisel, an amateur musician and hostess of star-studded Saturday 'dejeuners'; her lover Erwin Herzberg, the editor of the culture sections of the Frankfurter Zeitung; and Hanni's husband, Dr. Hermann Geisel, a successful lawyer and art collector. They constitute the Weimar triangle of the title. Koch again uses a multi-format narrative technique so highly praised in the German reviews of Recollections, including stories, excerpts from imagined memoirs, invented diaries, letters and even a synopsis of a never-produced operetta about the failed Hitler putsch of 1923, Putsching with Putzi.