Edward Lockspeiser

Edward Lockspeiser (21 May 1905 – 3 Feb 1973) was an English musicologist, composer, art critic and radio broadcaster on music who specialized in the works and life of French composer Claude Debussy and was considered one of the few British authorities on French classical music. Lockspeiser studied at the Paris Conservatory between 1922 and 1926 with Alexandre Tansman and Nadia Boulanger and at the Royal College of Music in London from 1929 to 1930 with Charles Herbert Kitson and Malcolm Sargent. He was voted into the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1948 for his services to French music.

Lockspeiser's extensive writings on Debussy include a two-volume biography, Debussy: His Life and Mind (1962, 1965), which was the culmination of 30 years of intense research into the composer's life and personality. According to Mark DeVoto of The Boston Musical Intelligencer, this tome "remains a landmark work of biography enriched by a wide-ranging analysis of Debussy’s cultural background and literary and artistic influences." He contributed the entry on Debussy in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, articles on Debussy, Felix Mendelssohn and Sergei Diaghilev to the Encyclopædia Britannica and numerous articles for Gramophone, Music & Letters, The Listener and The Musical Times. He was a guest lecturer at the University of London between 1966 and 1971; afterwards, he served in the same capacity at the Collège de France.

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