Paul Griffiths (born 24 November 1947) is a British music critic, novelist and librettist. He is particularly noted for his writings on modern classical music and for having written the libretti for two 20th century operas, Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Elliott Carter's What Next?.
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Paul Griffiths was born in the Welsh town of Bridgend to Fred and Jeanne Griffiths.[1] He received his BA and MSc in biochemistry from Lincoln College, Oxford, and from 1971 worked as a freelance music critic. He joined the editorial staff of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1973 and in 1982 became the chief music critic for The Times, a post which he held for ten years. From 1992 to 1996, he was a music critic for The New Yorker, and from 1997–2005, for The New York Times. A collection of his musical criticism for these and other periodicals was published in 2005 as The substance of things heard: writings about music, Volume 31 of Eastman Studies in Music. He was named a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, when he also won a Deems Taylor Award for his notes for Miller Theatre.
In 1978, he also began writing reference books and monographs on classical music and composers starting with Modern music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez and Boulez (Volume 16 of Oxford Studies of Composers). Although the majority of these publications have dealt with 20th century composers and their music, he has also written more general works on classical music, including The String Quartet: A History (1985), The Penguin Companion to Classical Music (2005), and A Concise History of Western Music (2006).
In 1989, Griffiths published his first novel, [[Myself and Marco Polo: A Novel of Changes]], which went on to win the 1990 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the best first novel in the Europe and South Asia region.[2] The novel is a fictional version of Marco Polo's memoirs which he dictated to Rustichello da Pisa, his fellow inmate in the Genoese prison where he had been incarcerated upon his return from China. (Rustichello is the "myself" of the title.) Two years later, he published his second novel, The Lay of Sir Tristram, a retelling of the Tristan and Iseult legend interjected with the narrator's own love story and his meditations on the legend's fluctuating influence and interpretation over time.[3] Griffiths' most recent novel, let me tell you (2008), uses a constrained writing technique similar to those employed by the avant-garde Oulipo group. In let me tell you, Ophelia tells her story in a first-person narrative devised by Griffiths using only the 481 word vocabulary given to her in Shakespeare's Hamlet.[4]
Griffiths' first excursion as an opera librettist was The Jewel Box which used music from Mozart's unfinished operas Lo sposo deluso and L'oca del Cairo as well as several arias and ensembles that he had written for insertion into operas by other composers. The story-line is an imagined reconstruction of a pantomime in which Mozart and Aloysia Weber are said to have taken part in 1783. The Jewel Box premiered in 1991 in Nottingham performed by Opera North and conducted by Elgar Howarth. It was subsequently performed in the United States by Skylight Opera Theatre (1993), Wolf Trap Opera (1994), Chicago Opera Theater (1996), and New Jersey State Opera (1996). It was revived by Bampton Classical Opera in 2006 for the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. His second work of this type, Aeneas in Hell, was set to songs and dance music from Purcell's theatre scores and was devised as a "prequel" to the composer's 1689 opera, Dido and Aeneas. It premiered in 1995 at the University of Maryland's Ulrich Recital Hall conducted by Kenneth Slowik.[5]
Griffiths' libretto for Tan Dun's Marco Polo was his first for an opera by a living composer. In the late 1980s Tan Dun has been commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival to compose an original opera. As he recounted in a 1997 interview:
I first tried to write the libretto myself, about something from myself, and wasn't getting anywhere. Then someone, in 1990, said why not read Paul Griffiths's novel Myself and Marco Polo? I read it and phoned him at his home near Oxford. And he agreed to write a libretto.[6]
Marco Polo finally received its world premiere in 1996, not in Edinburgh as originally planned, but in Munich at the Munich Biennale. Although Griffiths' libretto was not directly related to or based on his novel, the first line of the opera, "I have not told one half of what I saw", was the novel's final statement.[7] Griffiths' next commission as a librettist was for Elliott Carter's only opera, What Next?. The work premiered in 1999 at Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden, conducted by Daniel Barenboim who also conducted its US premiere in a concert performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra the following year.[8]
In addition to his original libretti, Griffiths has produced modern English translations of those for Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, and Puccini's La bohème. He has also written poetic texts to accompany other classical music genres. His there is still time, subtitled "scenes for speaking voice and cello", is a spoken narration to accompany music by the cellist and avant-garde composer, Frances-Marie Uitti. As in his later novel, let me tell you, Griffiths' text uses Ophelia's vocabulary in Hamlet. The work was recorded in 2003 by ECM Records with Griffiths himself as the narrator.[9] A more recent collaboration of this type was The General, which premiered in Montreal on 16 January 2007, with Kent Nagano conducting the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. The General, a concert piece for symphony orchestra, narrator, soprano and chorus was conceived by Nagano as a tribute the Canadian General Roméo Dallaire. Griffiths' narrative texts, inspired by Dallaire's attempts to stop the Rwandan genocide, are interwoven with the music from Beethoven's complete Egmont score and his Opferlied (Song of Sacrifice).[10]
Paul Griffiths' first marriage ended in divorce. In 1998, he married the short-story writer, Anne West.[11]
Music history and criticism
Monographs on 20th century composers
Libretti
Novels and short stories
| Preceded by Andrew Porter |
Music Critic of The New Yorker 1992–1996 |
Succeeded by Alex Ross |