Berlioz Orchestral Music, BBC Music Guides, London, 64 p., 1969; Chinese edition, Taiwan, 1997.
A brief guide to the overtures and symphonies of a popular master of the Romantic orchestra.
Skryabin, Oxford University Studies of Composers, Oxford University Press, 71 p., 1978
This book traces all Skryabin’s music from his early Chopinesque Préludes and Études for piano to the avant-garde orchestral works Poème de l’Extase and Prometheus of his last years, with an analysis of his harmonic and melodic style
Berlioz, Master Musicians Series, London: Dent, 261 p., 1982; Oxford University Press, 200o; Spanish edition: Buenos Aires: Vergara, 1989.
Following the series formula, this study traces Berlioz’s life and works with a discussion of his musical style and his colourful career as a composer/critic/conductor in nineteenth-century Paris. The book includes a comprehensive list of works and bibliography.
Selected Letters of Berlioz, London: Faber & Faber, 479 p., 1995; New York: Norton, 1996
Berlioz’s brilliance as a writer is conveyed in his correspondence as well as in his critical writings, and this volume provides a rich sample of his preoccupations and tastes, as well as tracing his life and career between 1821 and his death in 1869.
Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise: A Translation and Commentary, Cambridge University Press, 388 p., 2002; paperback edition, 2007.
Admired and studied by most composers of the later nineteenth century, Berlioz’s Treatise is now of unique value as a guide to instrumental practice of his time and to the study of his own music, no longer as a textbook for novice composers. This new edition provides a new translation of the text along with a study of Berlioz’s actual practice in the art of orchestration.
Beethoven’s Century: Essays on Composers and Themes, Rochester University Press, 2008.
These twenty essays cover a wide range of topics from Beethoven to Machine Music, with essays on Schubert, Alkan, Liszt, Massenet, Janacek, comic opera, repeats in classical music, and much else. Professor David Charlton’s review said: “Few writers today can match Hugh Macdonald’s breadth and depth of scope. The essays in Beethoven’s Century are often cast in the civilised, liberal traditions of the era that they describe.”
Berlioz: the Last Years, Berlioz Society Bulletin no. 178, December 2008
Originally written as a regular chronicle in the Berlioz Society Bulletin under the heading “One Hundred Years Ago”, this was issued as a single publication closely narrating the events of Berlioz’s life between 1861 and his death in 1869.
Music in 1853: the Biography of a Year, Boydell & Brewer, 208 p., 2012, illustrated; Japanese edition, 2018; Spanish edition: Barcelona, 2019.
This is a “horizontal biography” of music between April 1853 and February 1854, tracing the interactive lives of leading musicians in France and Germany, principally Brahms, Joachim Liszt, Wagner, Berlioz, and Schumann. The book pinpoints significant events in this period, including the young Brahms’s leap to sudden fame, Berlioz and Wagner both composing music again after long gaps, and Schumann’s rapid mental decline. The narrative is vivid with geographical and musical detail, and is supported by over fifty illustrations
Bizet, Oxford University Press, Master Musicians, 300 p., 2014.
A life-and-works study with a comprehensive list of works, following the formula of the series. Vincent Giroud described the book as a “richly documented, immensely readable, wonderfully sympathetic and perceptive account of Bizet’s life and œuvre by one of the world’s great experts on French music and opera.”
The Bizet Catalogue, online publication by Washington University Humanities Digital Workshop, first posted in 2014, http://digital.wustl.edu/bizet/
Shakespeare in Modern English: Three Plays,Troubador Publishing, 272 p., 2016, ISBN 998178589402
This book presents versions of As You Like It, Coriolanus and The Tempest in modern English. Their purpose is to enhance the enjoyment and understanding of audiences in the theatre, and emphatically not to make life easier for children or dummies. Since Shakespeare’s language can be obsolete or obscure, many lines cannot be grasped by audiences unless they have studied the plays in advance, while continental audiences usually have a better understanding of them from the more modern translations they generally hear. The translations aspire to the kind of language that dramatists might have used around 1900, with blank verse retained.
Saint-Saëns and the Stage: Operas, Plays, Pageants, Ballet and a Film, Cambridge Studies in Opera, Cambridge University Press, 432 p., 2019, ISBN 978-1-108-42638-1/2
This is the first comprehensive study in any language of a branch of the composer’s work seriously neglected (with the notable exception of Samson et Dalila) since his death in 1921. The book provides a historical and critical account of each work with a record of its performance history, such as it is, and it coincides with a renewed interest in Saint-Saëns’ stage works.
Bizet in Italy: Letters and Journals, 1857-1860, The Boydell Press, 258 p., 2021. Illustrated. ISBN 978-1-78327-590-9
The two years Bizet spent in Italy as winner of the Prix de Rome are well documented since he wrote home to his parents every two weeks and kept a journal on some of his trips around the Italian countryside. The letters are here presented in full for the first time, along with the journals, of which only short fragments have previously been known. They reveal a passion for the landscape and genuine connoisseurship for Italian Renaissance painting, an unexpected aspect of the composer of Carmen.