Review
`Using documentation hitherto unavailable, This book now supersedes the earlier study by Vallas and becomes the standard work on d'Indy.' James Harding, BBC Music
Book Description
Over sixty years after his death in 1931, Vincent d'Indy is still a much misunderstood and maligned figure in French music. Previous biographers have left a portrait of the academic figure par excellence, who turned the seemingly inspired and selfless inspiration of his master Cesar Franck into a cold and authoritarian pedagogical system. This new study re-examines the evidence, reveals a much more psychologically complex and turbulent character, and finds that d'Indy was a tireless propagandist for a spiritual revival of French musical civilization. Yet he was fully aware of the social and intellectual problems of the secular Third Republic which militated against his Dante-inspired Catholic humanism, embodied in the work of the Schola Cantorum, the Paris institution founded by d'Indy to reform the practice of sacred music. Far from being a pure reactionary, his outlook was in reality remarkably progressive, manifest in his revivals of early music, notably Monteverdi's Orfeo, his encouragement of Debussy, and his willingness to engage - often pugnaciously - with the latest musical manifestations of Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Varese. His own compositions likewise contain passages of astonishingly bold invention and modernistic effects, all too easily overlooked.
