Series: The Bard Music Festival

A collection of essays and documents illuminating the work of Bohuslav Martinů, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Bohuslav Martinů was one of the most extraordinary and prolific composers of the twentieth century. Martinů and His World offers a portrait of the composer in all his complexity. Born in the present-day Czech Republic, Martinů was rendered stateless as...

A biography of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. One of the most popular classical composers of all time, Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) has often been dismissed by critics as a conservative, nostalgic holdover of the nineteenth century and a composer fundamentally hostile to musical modernism. The original essays collected in Rachmaninoff and His World show...

A biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was one of the most innovative and creative figures in twentieth-century music, whose symphonies stand alongside those of Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, and Roussel. After his death, shifting priorities in the music world led to a period of critical neglect. What could not...

Claude Debussy's Paris was factionalised, politicised, and litigious. It was against this background of ferment and change—characterising French society and music from the Franco-Prussian War to World War I—that Debussy re-thought music. Debussy and His World captures the complexity of the composer's restless personal and artistic identity within the new picture emerging of the musical, social, and political world of...

A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner's estimation, he hovered as a "transient, marvellous exception," a composer woefully and wilfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller,...