SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY AWARD FOR STORYTELLING

Claude Debussy was that rare creature, a composer who reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of music lovers. He is the modernist everyone loves. How did he manage this? Was it through the association of his music with visual images, or was it simply that, by throwing out the rule book of the Paris Conservatoire where he studied, his music put beauty of sound above the spiritual ambitions of the German tradition from which those rules derived.
Stephen Walsh’s thought-provoking biography, told partly through the events of Debussy’s life, and partly through a critical discussion of his music, addresses these and other questions about one of the most influential composers of the early twentieth century.

‘A beautifully written study, mercifully free of academic jargon … [Walsh] combines delicacy of perception, refinement of expression and quiet persistence, in a way not so far from the great composer himself’ – Daily Telegraph

‘A lucid and elegant introduction to the French revolutionary… “a genius that is without precedent in western music since Monteverdi”… A mighty bow to draw, you may think, but long before the end of this excellent book the reader may well be won over to that view’ – The Times