The Companion to 20th Century Music

by Norman Lebrecht

An accessible guide to the music of this century covers ninety years and a great variety of styles and artists, from Puccini to Presley, from Rachmaninoff to rap. 10,000 first printing.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Reference

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Norman Lebrecht (born 11 July 1948 in London) is a British commentator on music and cultural affairs and a novelist. He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph from 1994 until 2002 and assistant editor of the Evening Standard from 2002 until 2009. On BBC Radio 3, he has presented lebrecht.live from 2000 and The Lebrecht Interview from 2006.

He has written twelve books about music, which have been translated into 17 languages. Coming up in 2010 is Why Mahler?, a new interpretation of the most influential composer of modern times. See Books for more details. Also coming back in print is Mahler Remembered (Faber, 1987).

Norman Lebrecht's first novel The Song of Names won a Whitbread Award in 2003. His second, The Game of Opposites, was published in the US by Pantheon Books. A third is in preparation.

A collection of Lebrecht columns will be published this year in China, the first such anthology by any western cultural writer. A Lebrecht conversation appears monthly in The Strad, magazine of the strings professions.

The Lebrecht Interview will return in July 2010 on BBC Radio 3 and there will be further editions of The Record Doctor in New York on WNYC.

A year-long series of events, titled Why Mahler?, will open on London's South Bank in September 2010, curated by Norman Lebrecht.

Other works in progress include a stage play and various radio and television documentaries.

Reviews

[Bill Hsu]

When there's a hint of scandalous gossip, you know Lebrecht will jump on it. This was somewhat useful and entertaining back in the day, but we can look up wikipedia for better organized listings of compositions etc. Sometimes the gossip is also available!

[Isidore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Along with his first book on Mahler, this is Lebrecht's most useful book: I consult it often. It contains a great deal of useful information along with a reasonable amount of personal opinion (not always clearly differentiated), and plenty of quirky Lebrechtisms. Given the brevity of the entries, Lebrecht is largely prevented from working up the hagiographies and hatchet-jobs which characterize his other biographical writings.

However, his truly obsessive anti-Communism does skew quite a few entries, sometimes even those of artists where such concerns are plainly irrelevant, as with Bartok. Communist composers for whom Lebrecht cares little are invariably dismissed as creators of "agitprop"; Communist composers of greater attractiveness must be carefully massaged so as to appear secret anti-Communists; there is often no evidence for this, it seems, other than Lebrecht's inner convictions. Oistrakh and Rostropovich get entries because they permit Lebrecht to ride his hobby-horse; Richter, Gilels, and Mravinsky (who premiered many of Shostakovich's most important works) evidently did not furnish a similar opportunity, and are omitted.

With Fascism, Lebrecht lets his pets off fairly easy, or omits mention of Fascistic/Nazi connections altogether. Very occasionally he will suggest that, even in the democratic West, composers do not operate in perfect freedom.

The one really disastrous aspect of the book is its coverage of popular music. I have a yet to find an entry on the subject which is not filled with errors. Lebrecht has no competence in that part of the musical world and should have left it alone.

[Muzzlehatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off, I must tell you that, though you won't find a ready indication on the cover, this is primarily and in fact 99% about classical music, musicians and composers. Yes, there are little write-ups about the Beatles and Elvis and slightly more substantial paragraphs on major jazz artists, but for the most part this is devoted to the significant, the major, the obscure and the really unheard-of classical composers who worked from 1900 to the 1980s. Lebrecht is pithy and curmudgeonly to a fault, though it livens up the essentially dull nature of an encyclopedic work; my biggest personal peeve is that he feels compelled to dredge up information about sex lives as often as possible, whether or not it seems to have significant impact on the personages in question.

Still, this is a useful little tome, with almost any composer you can think of mentioned, and plenty you haven't heard of; musicians and orchestras are also given some space, but most of the pages belong to Britten and Messiaen, Strauss and Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and the rest of the last century's great polyglot mix of traditionalism, romanticism, folksong, serialism, avant-garde and just outright weirdness.

[Tyler Knowlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is put together as a sort-of encyclopedia of 20th-century Western Art Music. I would never turn to this for scholarly information, but for an off-the-cuff understanding of 20th-century composers, techniques, works, developments, etc. it is really a fun and valuable book. Lebrecht is one of the most opinionated and outspoken of anyone in the classical music world. His writing is sardonic and witty. I really like this book.