In these essays, the leading French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez explains many of his most significant ideas about music. The essays are divided into four parts, the first three concerned with common preoccupations (aesthetic, technical, and polemical) and the last a collection of entries intended for a music encyclopedia. Boulez offers penetrating and provocative analyses of the music of the major figures of twentieth-century music including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Debussy, Messiaen, and Ravel. His illuminating comments arise from intimate knowledge of the music, and...

Widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art, yet no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have drawn too heavily from his own unreliable memoirs and conversations, and until now no biographer has possessed both the musical knowledge to evaluate his art and the linguistic proficiency needed to explore the documentary background of his life--a life whose span extended from tsarist Russia to Switzerland, France, and ultimately the United States.
In this revealing volume, the first of two,...

Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is widely acknowledged as one of the most original musical theater works of the twentieth century. This clear and concise guide, the first ever written on the work, describes the plot, the music and the staging in close detail and provides a fully documented discussion of the origins of Oedipus Rex in Stravinsky's own work and thinking. By placing the work in its social context, the author paints a vivid picture of Parisian artistic politics in the twenties, from which emerged one of the richest and most suggestive works of modern times. The full libretto is provided,...

Stephen Walsh's magisterial, engagingly written two-volume Stravinsky is the most detailed and extensive work available on the life of the man widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century. This second volume takes up the composer's story in 1934, in a Europe growing ever more chaotic in the lead-up to World War II. Walsh follows Stravinsky's emigration to the United States, where he courted Hollywood, associated with writers and artists including Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, and George Balanchine, began a career as a conductor and recording artist, and composed a...

In 1934, Igor Stravinsky was fifty-two, a Russian expatriate living in Paris and already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation. This work follows Stravinsky through the remainder of his long life, which he would spend largely in