Stravinsky the Music-maker

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 1948 and 1983, 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, born in Vienna in 1919, was one of the many Jewish refugees from Nazism who immensely enriched the cultural life of his adopted Britain. Beginning his writing career in psychoanalysis, he swiftly turned to music, eventually becoming the most influential writer on music in Britain after Donald Tovey. His prose, like his broadcasts for the BBC, where he worked for two decades, reflects the unshakable humanism of his basic outlook - he was, for example, a leading campaigner against capital punishment in the early 1960s. His individualism was the more tenacious for the encroachment of collectivist pressure: one of his books beginning with the injunction `Thinkers of the World, Disunite!' Although he died in 1985, aged only 66, Keller's influence can still be felt, not only as a thinker: he taught or counselled many of the leading musicians and composers of the succeeding generations, always arguing that the teacher's first duty is to make himself unnecessary.
Milein Cosman, born in Gotha in 1921 and brought up in Dusseldorf, came to Britain in 1939, attended the Slade School of Fine Art in wartime exile in Oxford, and soon established a reputation for insightful portraiture, capturing the essence of her subjects in a few-swift lines. She is especially renowned for her portraits of musicians, her subjects encompassing some of the best-known names of the last seventy years, including Furtwangler, Strauss, Menuhin, Ogdon and Britten. Her work is celebrated in an evergrowing number of publications and galleries, including a permanent exhibition of her drawings of musicians in the Wigmore Hall.