Hugh Macdonald is Emeritus Professor of music at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, and he currently lives in Norwich, England. He was born in Newbury, Berkshire, in 1940. After study at Cambridge University he was on the faculties of Cambridge and Oxford Universities before being named Professor of Music at Glasgow University in 1980. From 1987 until his retirement in 2011 he was Avis H. Blewitt Professor of Music at Washington University.

He is a specialist in the music of the nineteenth century and has written books on Skryabin, Berlioz, Bizet and Saint-Saëns. As an editor, he was General Editor of the 26-volume New Berlioz Edition, published by Bärenreiter, Kassel, between 1967 and 2006. He has also been responsible for editions of music by Alkan, Bizet, Chabrier, Fauré, Lalo, Saint-Saëns, Smetana and Walton. He has edited collections of letters by Berlioz and Bizet.

As a translator, he has published at edition with commentary of Berlioz’s Grand Traité d’Instrumentation, and he has been an ardent advocate of opera sung in English. His translations for singing include works by Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, Debussy, Cornelius, Gluck, Gounod, Hayden, Poulenc and others.

He has written programme notes for many leading orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, and Lincoln Centre, New York. He has provided opera programme essays for Covent Garden, English National Opera, the Met, Netherlands Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Glyndebourne Opera, the St. Louis Opera Theatre, and others. For many years he was a regular pre-concert speaker for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.