Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Debussy's Letters to Inghelbrecht: The Story of a Musical Friendship.

Article Excerpt
Debussy's Letters to Inghelbrecht: The Story of a Musical Friendship. Annotated by Margaret Cobb, translated by Richard Miller. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005. [xix, 113 p. ISBN 1-580-46174-3. $65.] Illustrations, appendices, index, discography, bibliography.

Le martyre de Saint Sebastien brought Desire-Emile Inghelbrecht into Debussy's orbit. Inghelbrecht was appointed chorus master for the premiere in 1911 and he subsequently prepared an orchestral version of the work in close collaboration with Debussy, which Inghelbrecht conducted on 14 and 17 June 1912 (p. 4). This was the year that witnessed the beginning of a modest but nevertheless interesting correspondence between the two men that continued until 1917. The surviving material is published complete in this volume with annotations by Margaret Cobb, a short biography of Inghelbrecht, and translations by Richard Miller facing the original French. On Debussy's side there are twenty-seven letters and four postcards; on Inghelbrecht's just one letter; a few supplementary letters to and from others. The Debussy-Inghelbrecht letters belonged to Inghelbrecht's widow, who gave them to Cobb late in her life, in recognition no doubt of her tireless efforts on behalf of both composer and conductor. Hence the present publication.

Volumes devoted to just one of Debussy's many correspondents such as this one now exist as a subset of Francois Lesure, Denis Herlin, and Georges Liebert's magisterial and magnificent 2,330-page volume of letters, Correspondance, 1872-1918, (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). It will be years before the implications of this sudden abundance of material, much of it previously unpublished, are fully understood and interpreted. The Inghelbrecht volume is indeed a subset of it, for...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!