Paul Anthony Griffiths

British music critic, novelist and librettist, noted for his writings on modern classical music and for having written the libretti for two twentieth-century operas, Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Elliott Carter's What Next?. His biographies of twentieth-century composers such as Ligeti and Messiaen and his historical survey Modern Music and After are standards. He is the sole author of The New Penguin Dictionary of Music (2011), and his A Concise History of Western Music (2006) has been tranlated into Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Chinese. In 1982 he became the chief music critic for The Times of London, a post 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 was published in 2005 as The substance of things heard: writings about music, Volume 31 of Eastman Studies in Music. 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. His most recent novel, let me tell you, is a tour-de-force in the voice of Ophelia, constructed using only the words spoken by her in Hamlet. He delivered the Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in 2008.