Vincent Giroud

The greatest prose writer of twentieth-century Polish letters, Witold Gombrowicz is also recognized as a figure whose literary standing is comparable to Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, or Beckett. Yet his reputation in the United States and the English-speaking world has never been equal to his renown in continental Europe or in Latin America. In a letter to an American publisher preserved in his archive at the Beinecke Library, he writes that he hoped to be read in America someday, at least by the elite. Yet Gombrowicz is no elitist writer. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Gombrowicz's birth, the Yale commemoration is part of the "Gombrowicz Autumn" in the United States, featuring performances of his plays, screenings of film adaptations of his works, photographic exhibitions, and publications by and about him.

Catalog of a Centenary Exhibition at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

The World of Witold Gombrowicz 1904-1969

Michael Kaye

Giroud and Kaye tell the full story of The Tales of Hoffman for the first time. After discussing the work's influences and history, the book details sources for the opera, including the complete Barbier and Carré play. The annotated libretto is published in full, with the variants, and essays explain the enduring evolution of the opera.

Origin, History, and Restoration of an Operatic Masterpiece

The Real Tales of Hoffmann

"A brilliant overview of the history of French opera, scrupulously researched and eminently readable. The people, the politics, the scandalsûinformative and entertaining."-Richard Bonynge AO, CBE --

A Short History

French Opera

Parole in Libertà

Marinetti's Metal Book

Composer and cultural official Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78) led an unusual life even for a composer who was also a high-level diplomat. Nabokov was for nearly three decades an outstanding and far-sighted player in international cultural exchanges during the Cold War, much admired by some of the most distinguished minds of his century for the range of his interests and the breadth of his vision. Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music follows Nabokov's life through its fascinating details: a privileged Russian childhood before the Revolution; exile, first to Germany, then to France; the beginnings of a promising musical career, launched under the aegis of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes with Ode in 1928; his twelve-year American exile during which he occupied several academic positions; his return to Europe after the war to participate in the denazification of Germany; his involvement in anti-Stalinist causes in the first years of the Cold War; his participation in the Congress for Cultural Freedom; his role as cultural adviser to the Mayor of Berlin and director of the Berlin Festival in the early 1960s; the resumption of his American academic and musical career in the late 1960s and 1970s. Nabokov is unique not only in that he was involved on a high level in international cultural politics, but also in that his life intersected at all times with a vast array of people within, and also well beyond, the confines of classical music. Drawing on a vast array of primary sources, Vincent Giroud's first-ever biography of Nabokov will be of interest readers interested in twentieth-century music, Russian music, Russian emigration, and the Cold War, particularly in its cultural aspects. Musicians and musicologists interested in Nabokov as a composer, or in twentieth century Russian composers in general, will find in the book information not available anywhere else.

A Life in Freedom and Music

Nicolas Nabokov

The greatest prose writer of twentieth-century Polish letters, Witold Gombrowicz is also recognized as a figure whose literary standing is comparable to Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, or Beckett. Yet his reputation in the United States and the English-speaking world has never been equal to his renown in continental Europe or in Latin America. In a letter to an American publisher preserved in his archive at the Beinecke Library, he writes that he hoped to be read in America someday, at least by the elite. Yet Gombrowicz is no elitist writer. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Gombrowicz's birth, the Yale commemoration is part of the Gombrowicz Autumn in the United States, featuring performances of his plays, screenings of film adaptations of his works, photographic exhibitions, and publications by and about him.

Pablo Picasso

The "Portrait of Gertrude Stein "was the first major work by Pablo Picasso to enter The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequeathed by Stein herself in 1946. A century after it was painted, this portrait remains one of the most powerful images of early-20th-century modernism. What was to be a lifelong friendship was but a few months old in the spring of 1906, when Picasso began his portrait of Stein. He was 24 years old at the time and she was 32, and both of their careers were at a critical stage. This engaging book recounts the extraordinary circumstances that led to Stein's first posing session and argues that the portrait played a key role not only in Picasso's work as a painter but also in his subject's creative life, as he became, in turn, the subject of several of Stein's literary portraits.

Vincent Giroud

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