About the Author

Jane F. Fulcher is Professor of Musicology at Indiana University. She is the author of The Nation's Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, and Composers, Intellectuals, and Politics in France from the First to the Second World War (forthcoming). She has served as Directeur d'Etudes Associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Directeur de Recherches at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

Reviews

Beginning with Brahms and His World in 1990, Princeton University Press has annually produced a collection of scholarly articles on the life and works of major 19th- and 20th- century composers as part of its "Bard Music Festival" series. This latest entry, edited by Fulcher (musicology, Indiana Univ.), contains an impressive collection of writings on France's greatest contemporary composer. There are 11 separate articles (including the introduction), grouped somewhat arbitrarily into three large categories: "The Evolution," "The Context," and "Documents." John Clevenger's lengthy essay on the early Rome cantatas dominates the first section, which also contains Leon Botstein's outstanding piece on Debussy and contemporary painting, as well as Fulcher's own provocative essay on Debussy's intellectual rigor in his wartime compositions. Highlights of the second section include Rosemary Lloyd's take on Debussy and Mallarm and Christophe Charle's view of Debussy's life within the context of fin-de-sicle Paris. Clevenger returns in the final section with an entertaining archival presentation of the young Debussy's achievements as a student in the Paris Conservatoire (complete with his teachers' evaluative comments). All of the articles will appeal to musicologists and students of French cultural history; lay readers, on the other hand, may find them tough to read. Recommended for academic collections. Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.