Like any book that combines facts with ideas, mine is the outcome of years of contact with other musicians, composers, pianists, fellow critics, and straightforward music lovers, who often come out with suggestive thoughts about music from direct experience, uncluttered by theories of music history. This is particularly true of Debussy, a composer loved by many who respond instinctively to the beauty of his music without it occurring to them that he might seriously be regarded as one of the very greatest, which is roughly speaking my view. Luckily the brain is a sponge that absorbs without remembering, which is why this list of credits is short. My most obvious debt is to the authors of the books cited in the footnotes and bibliography, often supplemented and enriched by personal conversation, especially with Paul Roberts and with Roger Nichols, always a generous adviser on matters French. In general, Debussy is a composer other composers talk about, and I have learnt a great deal from conversations with Anthony Powers, Robin Holloway, George Benjamin, and others too numerous to list. Colin Matthews read the manuscript and made a number of acute observations, most of which I have incorporated. On painters, I have been enormously helped (though it may surprise them) by Charles MacCarthy, Susannah Fiennes, and my cousin-in-law Richard Dorment, whose writings on art are an object lesson in how to combine aesthetic criticism with the discussion of techniques and materials.
The book is a biography, but the biographical materials are mainly from published sources, all I hope duly acknowledged. It has not involved endless trekking from foreign archive to foreign archive, but could not have been written without the generous and efficient help of, in particular, the music librarians at Cardiff University, who have never hesitated to track down, copy and send vital materials to this remote and now ineffectual don. It has been a huge pleasure to work once again with Jill Burrows, a perfect, meticulous, but unpernickety copy editor, and with Belinda Matthews at Faber, an attentive publisher who knows how to make pressure look and feel like encouragement. My gratitude to Chuck Elliott, Knopf’s long-standing commissioning editor in the UK and a dependable sounding-board on all aspects of what is and is not required of a book of this kind, is I hope adequately recognised in the dedication.
Stephen Walsh
Welsh Newton, September 2017