Thought perhaps the thread on singers' autobiographies might be expanded to cover biographies of musicians in general? Musicians' biographies really came into their own in the nineteenth-century, with Stendhal's biography of Rossini, Philipp Spitta's of Bach, Otto Jahn's of Mozart, Thayer's of Beethoven, and so on (later Max Kalbeck's epic hagiography of Brahms falls into this category). Nowadays there are swathes of biographies of composers, performers and sometimes other figures associated with music, of all types. I wondered which biographies anyone liked, what they look for in a biography, what might make biographies important, and so on? Anyone fond of 'documentary biographies' that essentially tell the story of someone's life through a judicious selection of primary sources (a tradition of biographical writing which is more prominent in German than in English)?

Some contemporary biographies I like:
Christoph Wolff on Bach
Peter Gay on Mozart
David Wyn Jones and Lewis Lockwood on Beethoven
Christopher Gibb on Schubert
John Daverio on Robert Schumann
Nancy B. Reich, Monica Steegmann, Beatrix Borchard on Clara Schumann
Alan Walker on Liszt
Siegfried Kross, Karl Geiringer and Styra Avins on Brahms (and the much earlier biography by Florence May)
Stephen Walsh on Stravinsky (haven't read the second volume fully yet, though)

Open in front of me on the desk as I research some programme notes is the Messiaen biography by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone. It has a few imprecisions here and there (I do wish they'd checked how to spell Sherbrooke Forest...) but lots of documentary material and Messiaen's story is moving in itself. (To me, anyway.)

Better wait until I've read it before I express an opinion there.

Some great stuff here - and certainly rather Daverio than Worthen which seems to have an agenda to point-prove by means of prioritising the pathological above the musical - Walker on Liszt is quite simply required reading and the excellent Walsh on Stravinsky is, frankly, peerless in my 'umble opinion (and that is an opinion that stands regardless of the fact that - dare I admit it - his subject has always struck me as one of the most overrated figures in music - sorry, folks, I know that I'm inviting megatons of abuse upon my silly head but I'd almost rather do that than be totally dishonest...)

Best,

Alistair

I would agree that I get a heck of a lot more out of Prok than out of Strav... all the same, part of what gets a composer 'canonical' is proposing directions that later music takes up and I'd have to admit that even though he doesn't turn my crank often, Igor scores very highly in that department.

But I sometimes wonder if that is so fundamental to canonisation - thinking of the fact that Ravel is canonised, and it's much harder to make the case for his being a highly influential figure?

I read it at a quite tender age when La Transfiguration was the most recent piece covered - I don't know if there's been a revised edition since then - and I found it rather plodding and simplistic. Hill and Simeone's recent biography is very well worth reading, in fact it's one of the more absorbing composer biographies I've read and contains more insights into the work (and Messiaen's work process) that one might expect, plus a balancing of all the available evidence regarding the circumstances of the composition and premiere of the Quatuor. I recommend it very highly, in other words.

I have a biography of Prokofiev by Claude Samuel, a French critic. The trouble is he's very sniffy about the 7th symphony, dismissing it as banal. But it's one of my favourite works by Prokofiev.