This is the first comprehensive selection of his writings to be published in English. It contains all the most important of the composer's essays and interviews, throws light on the trying conditions under which he was obliged to work in the 1920s and '30s, especially in education, and gives perceptive assessments of the work of some of the major composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- Wagner, Strauss, Stravinsky, Ravel, Satie and others -- and the trends they embodied. A number of pieces of a more biographical nature are included, not least Szymanowski's touching...