Vindications: Essays Romantic Music

Contains all Cooke's major articles, including essays on the four composers he cared about most passionately- Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler and Delius. The essay on Beethoven's late quartets, Lennon-McCarney songs, and a sample of his writing about literature are also included.
Extract: "Shortly before he died, I suggested to Deryck Cooke in a letter that he might collect together into a book those of his published articles he thought worth reprinting. He replied, with characteristic self-deprecation, that ‘apart from the Beethoven article [‘The Unity of Beethoven’s Late Quartets’] . . . and one or two salvoes on the Mahler Ten warfront—which wouldn’t make any sort of book — there aren’t any!’ After Cooke’s death in October 1976, Hazel Smalley, my brother Colin and I assembled all of his articles we could find and soon discovered that, as we had suspected, there was copious material for a book: indeed, the task of selection was a difficult one, but we had the generous assistance of Berthold Goldschmidt, who read through all the available material and concurred in our final choice. Our omissions are, for the most part, of the shorter, more straightforward pieces; all Cooke’s major articles  will be found here, including essays on the four composers he cared about most passionately—Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler and Delius.  The essay on Beethoven’s late quartets presents an important and cogent theory which challenges most accepted views of these works. To make the selection as comprehensive as possible, we have included his justification of the Lennon-McCartney songs—a  superb piece of no-nonsense analysis—and, as a sample of his flair for writing about literature as well as music, a BBC talk on Wuthering Heights, which, as Bryan Magee notes in his Memoir, was Deryck Cooke’s favourite novel."