Paul Griffiths was born on 24 November 1947 in the Welsh town of
Bridgend to Fred and Jeanne Griffiths. He received his BA and MSc in biochemistry from
University of Oxford, and from 1971 worked as a freelance music critic. He joined the editorial staff of
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1973 and in 1982 became the
chief music critic for
The Times, a post which he held for ten years. From 1992 to 1996, he was a music critic for
The New Yorker, and from 1997 to 2005, for
The New York Times. A collection of his musical criticism for these and other periodicals was published in 2005 as
The Substance of Things Heard: Writings about Music (Eastman Studies in Music, 31). In 1978, he also began writing reference books and
monographs on classical music and composers starting with
Modern Music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez and
Boulez (Volume 16 of
Oxford Studies of Composers). Although the majority of these publications have dealt with 20th-century composers and their music, he has also written more general works on classical music, including
The String Quartet: A History (1985),
The Penguin Companion to Classical Music (2005), and
A Concise History of Western Music (2006). The last of these has been translated into seven languages. Griffiths has been a guest lecturer at institutions including the University of Southern California,
IRCAM, Oxford University, Harvard University, Cornell University (Messenger Lectures, 2008) and the City University of New York Graduate Center (Old Lecture, 2013), and has served on juries for international competitions, among them the
Premio Paolo Borciani and the ARD Musikwettbewerb. He was named a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, when he also won a Deems Taylor Award for his notes for Miller Theatre. In 1989, Griffiths published his first novel,
Myself and Marco Polo: A Novel of Changes, which went on to win the 1990
Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the best first novel in the Europe and South Asia region. The novel is a fictional version of
Marco Polo's memoirs which he dictated to
Rustichello da Pisa, his fellow inmate in the
Genoese prison where he had been incarcerated upon his return from China. (Rustichello is the "myself" of the title.) Two years later, he published his second novel,
The Lay of Sir Tristram, a retelling of the
Tristan and Iseult legend interjected with the narrator's own love story and his meditations on the legend's fluctuating influence and interpretation over time. Griffiths's third novel,
let me tell you (2008), uses a
constrained writing technique similar to those employed by the avant-garde
Oulipo group. In
let me tell you,
Ophelia tells her story in a first-person narrative devised by Griffiths using only the 481-word vocabulary given to her in Shakespeare's
Hamlet. Griffiths uses the same 481-word constraint in the 2023 sequel
let me go on. Griffiths's first excursion as an opera
librettist was
The Jewel Box which used music from
Mozart's unfinished operas
Lo sposo deluso and ''
L'oca del Cairo as well as several arias and ensembles that he had written for insertion into operas by other composers. The storyline is an imagined reconstruction of a pantomime in which Mozart and Aloysia Weber are said to have taken part in 1783. The Jewel Box'' premiered in 1991 in
Nottingham performed by
Opera North and conducted by
Elgar Howarth. It was subsequently performed in the United States by
Skylight Opera Theatre (1993),
Wolf Trap Opera (1994),
Chicago Opera Theater (1996), and
New Jersey State Opera (1996). It was revived by
Bampton Classical Opera in 2006 for the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. His second work of this type,
Aeneas in Hell, was set to songs and dance music from
Purcell's theatre scores and was devised as a "prequel" to the composer's 1689 opera,
Dido and Aeneas. It premiered in 1995 at the
University of Maryland's Ulrich Recital Hall conducted by Kenneth Slowik. Griffiths's libretto for
Tan Dun's
Marco Polo was his first for an opera by a living composer. In the late 1980s, Tan Dun was commissioned by the
Edinburgh International Festival to compose an original opera. As he recounted in a 1997 interview: I first tried to write the libretto myself, about something from myself, and wasn't getting anywhere. Then someone, in 1990, said why not read Paul Griffiths's novel
Myself and Marco Polo? I read it and phoned him at his home near Oxford. And he agreed to write a libretto.
Marco Polo finally received its world premiere in 1996, not in Edinburgh as originally planned, but in
Munich at the
Munich Biennale. Although Griffiths's libretto was not directly related to or based on his novel, the first line of the opera, "I have not told one half of what I saw", was the novel's final statement. In addition to his original libretti, Griffiths has produced modern English translations of those for
Stravinsky's
Histoire du soldat, Mozart's
Die Zauberflöte, and
Puccini's
La bohème. Griffiths has also written original texts for non-operatic settings, including
The General, which premiered in
Montreal on 16 January 2007, with
Kent Nagano conducting the
Montreal Symphony Orchestra.
The General, a concert piece for symphony orchestra, narrator,
soprano and chorus, had been commissioned by Nagano as a tribute to the Canadian General
Roméo Dallaire. Griffiths's narrative texts, inspired by Dallaire's attempts to stop the
Rwandan genocide, are interwoven with the music from
Beethoven's complete
Egmont score, other theatre music and
Opferlied (
Song of Sacrifice). Other musical collaborations have come out of his novel
let me tell you, including
there is still time, subtitled "scenes for speaking voice and cello", with spoken narration accompanying music by the cellist-composer
Frances-Marie Uitti. The work was recorded in 2003 by
ECM Records with Griffiths himself as the narrator. More directly connected to the novel is a concert work by
Hans Abrahamsen, also titled
let me tell you and composed for
Barbara Hannigan with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, who gave the first performance on 20 December 2013,
Andris Nelsons conducting. Griffiths was appointed
Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to music, literature, and composition. ==Bibliography==