Edward J. Dent – författare

During his long career, Edward Dent wrote on a variety of musical subjects, ranging from substantial articles in the most learned journals to less weighty pieces in Radio Times. This volume aims to reflect that variety. Some of the articles are now of primarily historical interest, others offer insights of a fundamental kind; all are informed by Dent's witty and distinctive prose style. In editing this collection, Hugh Taylor has drawn on writings from 1903 to 1951 and included two pieces originally written in Italian and published here in English for the first time. As well as providing footnotes, which amplify certain of Dent's statements and draw attention to subsequent research, Mr Taylor has listed sources for Dent's many textual references and quotations. Brought together in this way Dent's learned but always readable criticism will appeal to the reader with a general interest in music as well as to the music student and specialist.

This book was first published in hard covers in 1976 to mark the centenary of the birth of Edward J. Dent, now best remembered as translator of Mozart's opera libretti, as author of the best-known popular introductory book, Opera (Penguin) and for his book on Mozart's Operas (Oxford). He was a scholar of great range and wrote with style and wit. For many years he was professor of Music at Cambridge. Deriving from a course of previously unpublished lectures, the book concentrates on the crucial romantic period and shows how romantic opera had its origins not in Germany, as is often thought, but in the music-dramas and operas of revolutionary France and that this music was a source of nineteenth-century German symphonic style as well as of grand opera. The book is edited by Winton Dean who supplied a brief introduction and a number of notes incorporating relevant scholarship.

Originally published in 1951, this book contains the complete text of Il Mostro Turchino, or The Blue Monster, by Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806). The play is presented in an English translation, with a detailed introduction containing information on historical context. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in eighteenth-century Italian drama and translation.

The Future of Music was first published under the title TERPANDER or Music and the Future in 1926 in a series ""To-day and Tomorrow"" (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.). It has been reset and is reissued as a tribute to a great British musician, Edward J. Dent. Dent was fifty years old when he wrote this little book the future of music. Though his book is concerned with twentieth-century music he scarcely mentions any living composer by name. He is dealing primarily with taste and with our varied reactions to the music of the past and the present. The past is important, because it is both a key and an obstacle to our appreciation of the present. For this reason Dent includes a masterly summary of the history of music, from which his own preferences are almost entirely excluded; and to this is added a miniature essay on aesthetics which can be read with profit even by those who have no special interest in music.