"splendid... its fluent readability and avoidance of unnecessary detail make it easily accessible to the general reader. A welcome bonus is a CD with 22 songs interpreted by outstanding singers of at least two generations."
-George Jellinek, author, critic, and host of WQXR's nationally syndicated program "The Vocal Scene"
"as user-friendly a guide to Tchaikovsky song as the general reader could wish for."
-Andrew Green, "Classical Music"
"indispensable... each short chapter, focused on a different song, is a snapshot of a creative moment in Tchaikovsky's career, and emerging from the whole is the story of an inspired life in an extraordinary era."
-Nancy Ries, "The Colgate Scene"
"It's not often that a book really does 'fill a long-felt want,' but here is an example, and an outstanding one... The core of the book is the discussions of each [lyric], its author and its significance to Tchaikovsky. These come from a deep knowledge of Russian poetry and ideas... The three-page introduction to Tchaikovsky's finest set, for instance, the Op 73 group, is ideal preparation for enjoyment of these amazing songs."
-John Warrack, "Gramophone"
"... an unexpected, long-overdue, and welcome labor of love, imbued with intelligent scholarship... much more than a song anthology or pedantic study." -Elizabeth Blades-Zeller, "Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association"
"presents an enormous amount of information in a convenient format, with comprehensible translations and a coherent organization, making these songs more accessible to the non-Russian speaker than perhaps any Russian vocal music has heretofore been."
-Leslie Kearney, "Slavic Review"
"Sylvester ... sweeps the reader into the creative world of Tchaikovsky, describing the 'romances,' and, in the process, the cultural and political times in which the composer lived... [sharing] a wealth of information with a storyteller's knack."
-Debra Greschner, "Journal of Singing"
"Richard Sylvester has wrapped Tchaikovsky's songs in such vibrant, illuminating layers of information-linguistic, musical, biographical, poetic-that they emerge from this volume as living events, resonant with stories of their own. With these scrupulous contextualizations, a new standard is set for scholarship on Russian song."
-Caryl Emerson, Princeton University, author of "The Life of Musorgsky"
