Stephen Walsh

Everyone loves romantic music: the sweet melody of a Schubert song, the heroine dying for love in an Italian opera, the swooning orchestration of a Tchaikovsky symphony. But as Stephen Walsh - author of the highly praised Debussy: A Painter in Sound - points out in this intensely absorbing study, there is infinitely more to romantic music than meets the eye. The Beloved Vision amounts to a complete, entertaining and singularly readable account of the whole phase in music history that has become the mainstay of the twentieth and twenty-first century concert and operatic repertoire, with some little help from earlier times.The narrative begins in the eighteenth century, with C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and the literary movement known as Sturm und Drang, seen as a reaction of the individual artist to the confident certainties of the Enlightenment. The windows are flung open, and everything to do with style, form, even technique, is exposed to the emotional and intellectual weather, the impulses and preferences of the individual composer. Risk taking - the braving of the unknown - was certainly an important part of what the composers wanted to do, as true of Chopin and Verdi as it is of Berlioz and Wagner. Its an exciting, colourful, story, told with passion but also with the precision and clarity of detail for which this author is so widely admired.

Debussys life is of extraordinary interest because, like Wagner and Stravinsky, he crossed artistic boundaries, associating as much with poets and artists as with musicians. His father was active in the 1871 Paris Commune and the composers childhood was thus unsettled, his musical preparation erratic, and his subsequent lifestyle somewhat bohemian by the bourgeois norms of the French musical establishment. He never went to a proper school, but was enough of a pianist to enter the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10. Whilst still a student he rebelled against the academy-taught "rules of composition" and constructed a language of his own, in constant rebellion against the heavy Wagnerian influence prevalent at that time. In the early 1900s he worked in Paris as a music critic. His own music during these years includes some of the greatest and most influential works of the early twentieth century: the opera Pelleas et Melisande, his orchestral masterpieces La Mer and Images, a series of profoundly original piano works (including two books of Preludes), and the ballet Jeux, premiered in Diaghilevs 1913 season just before Stravinskys Rite of Spring (which Debussy attended). His later years were plagued by the rectal cancer that eventually killed him in 1918. But he continued to compose until 1917 This was a period of political and cultural turmoil in French life, the Franco-Prussian war and its aftermath, the Dreyfus affair with its religious and military undercurrents, the general instability of the Third Republic, and the First World War. Stephen Walshs study combines chronological biography with a contextualised picture placing Debussy in the broad artistic and social environment of turn-of-the-century France, making this a significant contribution to the cultural history of the time.

The extraordinary group of Russian composers who came together in St Petersburg in the 1860s - long known as The Mighty Handful, but, as the moguchaya kuchka, better translated as the great little heap - gave rise to one of the most fascinating and colourful stories in all musical history. Stephen Walsh, author of a major biography of their direct successor, Stravinsky, has written an absorbing account of Musorgsky and his circle - Borodin, Cui, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov. With little or no musical education they created works of lasting significance - Musorgskys Boris Godunov, Borodins Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakovs Sheherazade. Written with deep understanding and panache, The Kuchka, is highly engaging and a significant contribution to cultural history.

Narración sin concesiones de la cruda realidad de una guerra que cambió el curso de la historia. Se analiza la batalla de Stalingrado, sus precedentes y consecuencias de la mano de un experto en historia militar sovietica y se acompaña de un documento grafico con fotografias ineditas.

Claude Debussy es uno de los grandes compositores modernos no sólo por la belleza de sus obras, sino también por haber reinventado el lenguaje de la música. Este logro se basó en la asociación de su musica con imagenes visuales y, en buena medida, en el rechazo de las reglas dictadas por el Conservatorio de Paris, para situar el lirismo del sonido por encima de las ambiciones espirituales de la tradicion alemana, de la que procedian dichas reglas. Esta sugerente biografia de Stephen Walsh parte de esta premisa, y traza un sutil analisis tanto de los acontecimientos que marcaron la vida de Debussy como de su obra. Con un estilo elegante, inteligente y transparente el libro se torna una invitacion para revisitar la musica del compositor frances y repensar, una vez mas, la belleza.