Print Sources
Barrie Martyn's Nicolas Medtner: His Life and Music (ISBN 0-85967-959-4) is a scholarly account of the composer's life and works. It provides the biographical context of every composition along with musical analysis or commentary. Extracts from letters, contemporary sources, and compositions are interspersed throughout the narrative, along with a good number of photographs.
After Medtner's death, the Mysore Foundation sponsored the publication of Medtner: A Memorial Volume, also titled Nicolas Medtner (1879-1951): A Tribute to his Art and Personality. It contains photographs and essays from his widow, friends, critics, musicians, composers, and admirers. A few of the contributors were: Alfred Swan, translator of Medtner's The Muse and the Fashion into English, Ivan Ilyin, Ernest Newman, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Marcel Dupré, Russian music critic Leonid Sabeneev, Canadian pianist and close friend of the composer Alfred La Liberté, singers Margaret Ritchie, Tatania Makushina and Oda Slobodskaya, and Medtner himself via extracts from Muse and the Fashion. The editor of the volume was Richard Holt.
Robert Rimm's The Composer-Pianists: Hamelin and the Eight (ISBN 1-57467-072-7) contains a chapter on Medtner and Rachmaninoff.
In 2004, Natalia Konsistorum published, in Russian, Nikolai Karlovich Medtner: Portrait of a Composer (ISBN 3-89487-500-3). The book is available in a German translation by Christoph Flamm and is notable for the two CDs it contains with original recordings of a variety of Medtner's works.
There have been numerous dissertations on Medtner's music. One of the most influential is Der russische Komponist Nikolaj Metner : Studien und Materialien by Christoph Flamm. Originally presented as the author's Ph.D thesis (Heidelberg, 1995), it was published by Kuhn (ISBN 3-928864-24-6, 1995, out of print). It includes letters, reviews and other documents in German, Russian, English and French, a bibliography and partial discography.
In 2003, David J. Skvorak wrote a doctoral thesis Thematic unity in Nicolas Medtner's works for piano : Skazki, sonatas, and piano quintet at the University of Cincinnati, published by UMI. It contains theoretical analyses of several of Medtner's works.
For details of other publications, including dissertations at US Universities listed on the WorldCat library database, see www.medtner.org.uk
Read more about this topic: Nikolai Medtner
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