Arthur Hartmann (1881-1956), a celebrated violinist who performed over a thousand recitals throughout Europe and the United States, met Claude Debussy in 1908, after he had transcribed "Il pleure dans mon coeur" for violin and piano. Their relationship developed into friendship, and in February 1914 Debussy accompanied Hartmann in a performance of three of Hartmann's transcriptions of Debussy's works. The two friends saw each other for the last time on the composer's birthday, 22 August 1914, shortly before Hartmann and his family fled Europe to escape the Great War. With the publication of Hartmann's memoir "Claude Debussy as I Knew Him", along with the twenty-two known letters from Claude Debussy and the thirty-nine letters from Emma Debussy to Hartmann and his wife, the richness and importance of their relationship can be appreciated for the first time. The memoir covers the years 1908-1918. Debussy's letters to Hartmann span the years 1908-1916, and Emma (Mme) Debussy's letters span the years 1910-1932. Also included are the facsimile of Debussy's Minstrels manuscript transcription for violin and piano, three previously unpublished letters from Debussy to Pierre Lou�s, and correspondence between Hartmann and B�la Bart�k, Nina Grieg, Alexandre Guilmant, Charles Martin Loeffler, Marian MacDowell, Hans Richter, and Anton Webern, along with Hartmann's memoirs on Loeffler, Ysa�e, Joachim and Grieg. Samuel Hsu is a pianist and Professor of Music at Philadelphia Biblical University. He completed his Ph.D. in Historical Musicology at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1972 with a dissertation on Debussy. Sidney Grolnic has been a librarian in the Music Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia for over twenty years and serves as curator of the library's Hartmann Collection. Mark Peters has recently received his Ph.D. in Historical Musicology at the University of Pittsburgh; his dissertation was on J. S. Bach's sacred cantatas to texts by Mariana von Ziegler.

English translation and revised edition of the most comprehensive and reliable biography of Claude Debussy. François Lesure's "critical biography" of Claude Debussy (Fayard, 2003) is widely recognized by scholars as the most comprehensive and reliable account of that composer's life and career as well as of the artistic milieu in whichhe worked. This encyclopedic volume draws extensively on Debussy's complete correspondence (at that time unpublished), a painstaking tracking of contemporary reviews and comments in the press, and an examination of other primary documents-including private diaries-that had not been available to previous biographers. As such, Lesure's book presents a wealth of new information while debunking a number of myths that had developed over the years since the composer's death in 1918. The present English translation and revised edition, by Debussy authority Marie Rolf, augments Lesure's numerous notes with several thousand new ones by Rolf, providing more precise information oncrucial and sometimes contentious points. It also reflects Debussy scholarship that has appeared since 2003, updating Lesure's seminal work. Rolf's translation-the first ever-will make Lesure's findings accessible to scholars, musicians, and music lovers in English-speaking lands and around the world. FRANÇOIS LESURE (1923-2001) was the Director of the Music division of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Professor of Musicology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, and Chair of Musicology at the École pratique des Hautes Études. MARIE ROLF is senior associate dean of graduate studies and professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music and a memberof the editorial board for the Ouvres complètes de Claude Debussy.

Today, Claude Debussy's position as a central figure in twentieth-century concert music is secure, and scholarship has long taken for granted the enduring musical and aesthetic contributions of his compositions. Yet this was not always the case. Unknown to many concert-goers and music scholars is the fact that for years after his death, Debussy's musical aesthetic was perceived as outmoded, decadent, and even harmful for French music. In Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation, Marianne Wheeldon examines the vicissitudes of the composer's posthumous reception in the 1920s and 30s, and analyzes the confluence of factors that helped to overturn the initial backlash against his music. Rather than viewing Debussy's artistic greatness as the cause of his enduring legacy, she considers it instead as an effect, tracing the manifold processes that shaped how his music was received and how its aesthetic worth was consolidated. Speaking to readers both within and beyond the domain of French music and culture, Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation enters into dialogue with research in the sociology of reputation and commemoration, examining the collective nature of the processes of artistic consecration. By analyzing the cultural forces that came to bear on the formation of Debussy's legacy, Wheeldon contributes to a greater understanding of the inter-war period--the cultural politics, debates, and issues that confronted musicians in 1920s and 30s Paris--and offers a musicological perspective on the subject of reputation building, to date underrepresented in recent writings on reputation and commemoration in the humanities. Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation is an important new study, groundbreaking in its methodology and in its approach to musical influence and cultural consecration.

Emma Bardac and her relationship with Claude Debussy take centre stage in this insightful exploration of their lives together. The singer Emma Bardac (1862-1934) has often been presented as a woman who ensnared Claude Debussy (1862-1918) because she wanted to be associated with his fame and to live a life of luxury. Indeed, in many biographies and composer-related studies of Debussy, the only mentions that she receives are brief and derogatory. Here Emma Bardac and her relationship with the composer take centre stage. The book traces Emma's Jewish ancestry and her background, the significant role of her wealthy uncle Osiris, her marriage at seventeen to the wealthy Jewish banker Sigismond Bardac, her affair with Gabriel Fauré and her liaison with and subsequent marriage to Debussy. As Gillian Opstad shows, the pressure and stifling effects of domestic life on Debussy's attitude to his composing were considerable. The financial consequences of their partnership were disastrous, and their circle of close friends was small. Emma suffered physically and mentally from the tensions of the marriage, particularly money worries, and the possibility that Debussy was attracted to her older daughter. She considered divorce but supported him through his deepest depression and during the First World War until he succumbed to cancer in 1918. After Debussy's death, Emma felt driven both on his behalf and for financial reasons to further performances of the composer's works and provoked the annoyance of other musicians by having early compositions resurrected, completed and performed. In this engagingly written biography, Gillian Opstad brings to light little-known facts about Emma's background and family, advances new insights into her relationship with Debussy, and provides a glimpse of an early twentieth-century Parisian milieu that experienced wide-spread antisemitism.

Stravinsky's influence on Debussy in 1910-13, rarely discussed, is demonstrated here in the many modernistic features of such works as the Preludes Book II, Khamma, and Jeux. This book reassesses the relationship between Debussy and Stravinsky, two of the most important composers of the early twentieth century. When the Russian composer traveled to France in 1910 to attend the premiere of his first ballet, The Firebird, he was invited to dine at the French composer's house, and a photo of the two commemorates the beginning of their friendship. Stravinsky was already acquainted with many of Debussy's earlier works, and Debussy was introduced to the Russian composer's first three ballets between 1910 and 1913. Stravinsky's early works contain Debussy-like passages, as in the opening measures of his opera The Nightingale, which echoes the opening measures of Debussy's "Nuages." As author Mark McFarland here shows, however, the adoption on Debussy's part of characteristics from Stravinsky's style is, perhaps surprisingly, no less substantial. Debussy borrowed motifs from both The Firebird and Petrushka as well as the Russian tradition of Leitharmony in his little-known ballet Khamma, and Stravinsky's ballets, including The Rite of Spring, seems to have sparked an exploration into octatonic harmony in Debussy's second book of piano preludes. McFarland's close analysis of parallel passages and usages in works of the two composers also reveals that Debussy eventually distanced himself from Stravinsky, perhaps fearing to seem like an acolyte rather than an innovator. His borrowings from Stravinsky (and Russian style) gradually disappear, as McFarland demonstrates by close attention to passages in some of the late works, which move in the direction of a neoclassicism that Stravinsky himself would soon adopt and expand further.

Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life, by Alec Wilder, in a new, annotated edition with introduction and supplementary material by David Demsey, foreword by jazz pianist Marian McPartland, and photographs by Louis Ouzer. Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life, by Alec Wilder, in a new, annotated edition with introduction and supplementary material by David Demsey, foreword by jazz pianist Marian McPartland, and photographs by Louis Ouzer. Alec Wilder is a rare example of a composer who established a reputation both as a prolific composer of concertos, sonatas, and operas, and as a popular songwriter [including the hit "I'll Be Around"]. He was fearsomely articulate and had a wide and varied circle of friends ranging from Graham Greene to Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz. Letters I Never Mailed, hailed at its first publication [in 1975, by Little, Brown], tells the story of Wilder's musical and personal life through unsent "letters" addressed to various friends. In it, he shares his insights -- and sometimes salty opinions -- on composing, musical life, and the tension between art and commercialism. Thisnew, scholarly edition leaves Wilder's original text intact but decodes the mysteries of the original through an annotated index that identifies the letters' addressees, a biographical essay by David Demsey, and photographs by renowned photographer and lifelong friend of Wilder, Louis Ouzer. David Demsey is Professor of Music and coordinator of jazz studies at William Paterson University and an active jazz and classical saxophonist. He is co-author of Alec Wilder: A Bio-Bibliography [Greenwood Press] and has contributed to The Oxford Companion to Jazz.

Exploring the many dimensions of Debussy's historical significance, this volume provides new perspectives on the life and work of a much-loved composer and considers how social and political contexts shape the way we approach and perform his works today. In short, focused chapters building on recent research, contributors chart the influences, relationships and performances that shaped Debussy's creativity, and the ways he negotiated the complex social and professional networks of music, literature, art, and performance (on and off the stage) in Belle Époque Paris. It probes Debussy's relationship with some of the most influential '-isms' of his time, including his fascination with early music and with the 'exotic', and assesses his status as a pioneer of musical modernism and his continuing popularity with performers and listeners alike.

John Cage was one of America's most renowned composers from the 1940s until his death in 1992. But he was also a much-admired writer and artist, and a uniquely attractive personality able to present his ideas engagingly wherever he went. As an interview subject he was a consummate professional. The main source of CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage is a panoply of vivid and compulsively readable interviews given to Peter Dickinson in the late 1980s for a BBC Radio 3 documentary. The original BBC program lasted an hour, but the full discussions with Cage and many of the main figures connected with him were not published until the first edition of this book. CageTalk also includes earlier BBC interviews with Cage, including ones by the renowned literary critic Frank Kermode and art critic David Sylvester. And Dickinson, the editor of this volume, contributes little-known source material about Cage's Musicircus and Roaratorio as well as a substantial introduction exploring the multiple roles that Cage's varied and challenging output played during much of the twentieth century and continuesto play in the early twenty-first. Apart from the long interview with Cage himself, there are discussions with Bonnie Bird, Earle Brown, Merce Cunningham, Minna Lederman, Otto Luening, Jackson Mac Low, Peadar Mercier, Pauline Oliveros, John Rockwell, Kurt Schwertsik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Virgil Thomson, David Tudor, La Monte Young, and Paul Zukovsky. Most of the interviews were given to Peter Dickinson but there are others involving Rebecca Boyle,Anthony Cheevers, Michael Oliver, and Roger Smalley. Peter Dickinson, British composer and pianist, is Emeritus Professor, University of Keele and University of London, and has written or edited several books about twentieth-century music, including Copland Connotations [Boydell Press, 2002] and The Music of Lennox Berkeley [Boydell Press, 2003].

A study on the influence which the German novelist Jean Paul Friedrich Richter had upon Robert Schumann's music.

The first full-length study of a remarkable composer, writer, painter, and expert on astrology, based on Rudhyar's personal archives.