Richard Langham Smith (born 10 September 1947, Barnes, London) is an English musicologist who has written on Debussy and contemporary French music in general. For his contribution to the latter he was admitted to rank of Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Educated in music at University of York, Richard Langham Smith then pursued further study with Wilfrid Mellers and Debussy scholar Edward Lockspeiser as well as studying harpsichord and Baroque performance practice at the Amsterdam Conservatory. A university teaching career began at University of Lancaster, then City University, the University of Exeter, and finally the Open University where he was the Arnold Kettle Distinguished Scholar in Music and subsequently Head of Department. At this time he also was a visiting lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge, teaching a course on French Opera from 1875 to the 21st Century. From September 2008 until July 2010 Smith was Head of the Graduate School at the Royal College of Music, London. In 2011 the RCM appointed him Research Professor in Music and in March 2016 Smith was awarded an FRCM. In addition to Academic teaching he is a lecturer for Martin Randall Travel, a regular broadcaster and lecturer for major concert venues and opera houses.
Claude Debussy was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, having abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions. His best-known work is the orchestral piece The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the fame of which has eclipsed that of his other surviving works. Among these are the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, his Symphony in C and Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, the Variations, Interlude and Finale on a Theme by Rameau, and a ballet, La Péri.
Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera in five acts with music by Claude Debussy. The French libretto was adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist play of the same name. It premiered at the Salle Favart in Paris by the Opéra-Comique on 30 April 1902; Jean Périer was Pelléas and Mary Garden was Mélisande, conducted by André Messager, who was instrumental in getting the Opéra-Comique to stage the work. The only opera Debussy ever completed, it is considered a landmark in 20th-century music.
Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868).
Sir Simon Keenlyside is a British baritone who has performed in operas and concerts since the mid-1980s.
André Charles Prosper Messager was a French composer, organist, pianist and conductor. His compositions include eight ballets and thirty opéras comiques, opérettes and other stage works, among which his ballet Les Deux Pigeons (1886) and opéra comique Véronique (1898) have had lasting success; Les P'tites Michu (1897) and Monsieur Beaucaire (1919) were also popular internationally.
Nocturnes, L. 91, CD. 98 is an impressionist orchestral composition in three movements by the French composer Claude Debussy, who wrote it between 1892 and 1899. It is based on poems from Poèmes anciens et romanesques.
Henry Lerolle was a French painter, art collector and patron, born in Paris. He studied at Académie Suisse and in the studio of Louis Lamothe.
Rodrigue et Chimène is an unfinished opera in three acts by Claude Debussy. The French libretto, by Catulle Mendès, is based on the plays Las Mocedades del Cid by Guillén de Castro y Bellvís and Corneille's Le Cid which deal with the legend of El Cid. It was first staged in a version completed by Edison Denisov in Lyon on 14 May 1993.
Salomé is a 1908 opera in one act by Antoine Mariotte to a libretto based on the 1891 French play Salome by Oscar Wilde. However, that work was itself inspired by Flaubert's Herodias. Mariotte began to compose his opera before the far more famous treatment of the same source by German composer Richard Strauss (Salome), but his premiered after the Strauss work.
Jonathan Philip Darlington is a British conductor, Music Director Emeritus of the Vancouver Opera and the former Music Director of the Duisburg Philharmonic Orchestra. He is known for his broad repertoire of both opera and symphonic music and appears regularly with major orchestras and opera houses, most notably the Paris Opera, Vienna State Opera, Frankfurt Oper, Orchestre National de France, Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra Sinfonica del San Carlo di Napoli, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, the National Orchestra of Taiwan, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera and Opera Australia.
James Ross is a British conductor and author.
Edward Lockspeiser was an English musicologist, composer, art critic and radio broadcaster on music who specialized in the works and life of French composer Claude Debussy and was considered one of the few British authorities on French classical music. Lockspeiser studied at the Paris Conservatory between 1922 and 1926 with Alexandre Tansman and Nadia Boulanger and at the Royal College of Music in London from 1929 to 1930 with Charles Herbert Kitson and Malcolm Sargent. He was voted into the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1948 for his services to French music.
Roy Shepherd MBE was an Australian pianist who is most renowned as a piano teacher at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium.
Thomas Forrest Kelly is an American musicologist, musician, and scholar. He is the Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard University. His most recent books include: The Role of the Scroll (2019), Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (2014), and Music Then and Now (2012).
Roger David Edward Nichols is an English musicologist, critic, translator and author. After an early career as a university lecturer he became a full-time freelance writer in 1980. He is particularly known for his works on French music, including books about Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc and the Parisian musical scene of the years after the First World War. Among his translations are the English versions of the standard biography of Gabriel Fauré by Jean-Michel Nectoux and of Harry Halbreich's study of Arthur Honegger.
La Damoiselle élue, L. 62, is a cantata for soprano soloist, 2-part children's choir, 2-part female (contralto) choir, and orchestra, composed by Claude Debussy in 1887–1888 based on a text by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It premiered in Paris in 1893.
Carl Gombrich is a British interdisciplinary educator, academic, former opera singer and co-founder of the London Interdisciplinary School.
Barbara Lucy Kelly is a musicologist specialising in 19th- and early 20th-century French music, an area in which she is widely regarded as a leading authority. She has dual UK and Irish citizenship. A professor and director of research at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, she is the first woman to be elected President of the Royal Musical Association (2021–2023).