Paris, Éditions du Sud, Albin Michel, 335 pages
“Just as Jacobin and Napoleonic expansion had tended to liberate peoples before giving them a new discipline, the School of Five broke the chains with which Italian and Classical tyranny had burdened the realm of music; in this sense Balakirev and his satellites, Borodin, Moussorgsky, César Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov were the heirs … of the French Berlioz and the Frenchized Hungarian Franz Lizt. The former was dead: the latter recognized his own. …
…Franz Lizt represents the second generation of musical Romanticism. …Freedom of interpretation, a legacy of 19th-century Romantic individualism, is an achievement due to Lizt and him alone. “