Voice Lessons

As a two-line postscript to her article on Debussy’s ‘La Mort des amants’ from his Cinq Poèmes de Ch. Baudelaire (‘The Echo, the Cry, the Death of Lovers’, Nineteenth Century Music, 18 (1994–5), 136–51), Katherine Bergeron comments that she ‘has left her discipline behind’ and that ‘this loss is bliss’. I take this to mean the discipline (and disciplines) of Musicology, and that its loss is her (and our) gain. Musicology has learnt to spread its wings. Long ago it ventured into literature and more recently into politics, aesthetics, and all kinds of philosophy. Sometimes musicologists swim too far out to sea, and among the strategies of the present book, which stems from a series of team-taught lectures, is to ensure safety by the proximity of literary experts. Without belittling Bergeron’s role in fixing these seminars on the printed page, this sometimes feels like a multi-author book with a single author.

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