Stravinsky the Music-Maker is the third incarnation of a book that has been greeted with superlatives on each previous appearance. Hans Keller and Milein Cosman collaborated down the decades of their married life, Keller's pen analysing music, Cosman's catching its makers at work. Stravinsky was a source of fascination for them both, and their Stravinsky at Rehearsal appeared in 1962, to be expanded, two decades later, as Stravinsky Seen and Heard. Stravinsky the Music-Maker offers the most generous compilation of their work yet: it includes Keller's complete articles on Stravinsky, written between 1954 and 1980, and augments Cosman's celebrated prints and drawings with a number not previously published. The introduction, by the composer Hugh Wood, sites the Keller-Cosman partnership in the framework of the British musical life they enriched.

HANS KELLER (1919-85) fled Austria in 1938 and became a commanding critical voice in British music journalism and on the BBC from the end of the war until his death. He is the author of numerous books, many illustrated by his wife Milein Cosman, including Criticism (Faber), The Great Haydn String Quartets (Dent), Essays on Music (CUP), Jerusalem Diary, Film Music and Beyond and Music and Psychology (all Plumbago). A critic of insight and integrity throughout his life, he remains a powerful influence to this day.

Hans Keller – born in Vienna in 1919 and a Jewish refugee from Nazism – became the most influential writer on music in Britain after George Bernard Shaw. His writings were always concerned with a search for the truth – ‘the truth about music, and the truth in music’, as he put it – and tackled the deepest musical questions head-on: why a piece of music had the effect it did; why a musician performed as he or she did; why the development of composition proceeded as it did. These issues and more were explored in a forty-year flood of writings, lectures and broadcasts.

Between 1957 and his death in 1985, Keller contributed almost sixty articles to the magazine Music and Musicians, and this book presents them all, edited and annotated by Mark Doran, from early pieces on composers he valued – Britten, Elgar, Schoenberg, Stravinsky – to ‘The Keller Column’, focussed on the vital questions of music education, and containing the last article he lived to write. At the heart of the book is the 31-part series ‘Truth and Music’, which contains the fullest and most detailed exposition Keller ever provided of his unique, music-centred aesthetics.

Hans Keller's capacity to stimulate, provoke, enlighten and inspire has never been more clearly demonstrated than in this engaging collection. Approachable in tone yet uncompromising in content, this book will cement his reputation as one of the essential musical thinkers in the English language.

The Norwegian composer Ludvig Irgens-Jensen (1894-1969) was one of the towering creative figures of his native land, although his dignified and powerful music does not receive the attention its quality deserves, either at home or abroad. The success of his dramatic symphony Heimferd (‘Homecoming’) in 1930 brought him national fame, but the post-War triumph of modernism, coupled with his personal modesty, pushed Irgens-Jensen's tonal music into the shadows: its contrapuntally based textures and its modally tinged harmonies were seen as things of the past. But a growing number of recordings is reminding listeners that he was one of the most distinguished and distinctive voices in twentieth-century music – a figure of international importance, writing music of striking nobility and strength of purpose with some meltingly lovely melodic lines.

Arvid O. Vollsnes' Ludvig Irgens-Jensen: The Life and Music of a Norwegian Composer is the first discussion in English of this profoundly decent man and his life-enhancing music. A review of the original Norwegian publication of this book in Aftenposten, the main Norwegian daily paper, described it as ‘a gripping biographical portrait. As well as Irgens-Jensen's life we get a broad picture of Norwegian musical life from the 1920s to his death in 1969’.

A CD of extracts from Irgens-Jensen's works has been prepared to accompany the English edition to provide readers with an introduction to his highly individual and immediately appealing sound-world.

The 121 letters collected in this book document Martinů's life in his own words, beginning as a student in Prague and Paris, following his flight from Nazi-occupied France and charting his triumphs in American exile; the last letter is dated shortly before his death in 1959. They are addressed to his family and friends back home in the village of Polička, on the Czech-Moravian border. Kept at a distance by the Nazi occupation and then by Communism, Martinů was never to return there but, in a letter to the mayor, written as a gesture of solidarity after August 1938, he proudly described himself as a ‘native son who is far from his home but who constantly returns – if only in his thoughts – with gladness – to that dear land – the most beautiful on earth’.