MICHAEL KENNEDY

When the Oxford Dictionary of Music first appeared, it was hailed by Music and Musicians as "without question the most comprehensive, detailed, reliable one-volume reference work on music now available in the English language." Fully revised and updated for this new edition, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Fourth Edition is a rich mine of information for lovers of music of all periods and styles, providing over 10,000 entries on musical terms, works, composers, librettists, musicians, singers, and orchestras. The dictionary's coverage is exceptional, providing comprehensive work-lists for major composers, detailed entries on living composers and performers, important ballets and operas, as well as descriptions of musicalinstruments and their histories. Written to appeal to general readers, musicians and musicologists alike, this volume is an indispensable addition to the reference shelf of the concert goer, the opera buff, the record buyer, or anyone involved in music, whether amateur or professional.

This important biography of Elgar draws on letters and documents which have become available in the last twenty-five years. Michael Kennedy, a leading scholar of British music and a distinguished musical biographer, uses this new material, which includes Elgar's own vast correspondence, in an attempt to get to the centre of the composer's complex personality. Elgar's letters reveal his unpredictable swings of mood, from gaiety and a fondness for puns to morose self-pity and a feeling that he was 'not wanted', and although much of Elgar's music sounds confident and coherent, it also has an underlying layer of unease, melancholy and insecurity. His relationships with his wife and other women friends are a continuing thread in the life of a man who remained acutely conscious of his lower middle-class origins in spite of his meteoric rise to fame, honours in Edward VII's reign and friendship with the King.