Paris, Les Editions du Sud, 345 pages

This biographical novel begins with a 3-page introduction, Le 19ème siècle et le triomphe de la bourgeoisie, which ends as follows:

“Certainly, from 1830 to the first decades of our 20th century, this was the golden age of the bourgeoisie, with that unpleasant nightmare of the Commune, a desperate attempt by the “possessed” class to shake off its yoke; this was the era, of which ours has retained so much nostalgia in the heart of its middle classes, when the Franc was as firm as a rock, and consequently patriarchal morality, severe, prudish and fixed. Where the little blue flower is cultivated all the more because gold is obtained at the price of sweat and blood…”.

“A lively, lively tone… A book full of anecdotes.” (Nouvelles littéraires)

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. “