Biography is a discipline sufficient to itself, and one which presents formidable intellectual challenges. As a component of art histories, however, its explanatory value needs careful assessment. The traditional ‘life and works’, much favoured by English writers on music, highlights the difficulties. With notable exceptions it has been a hybrid genre, seldom addressing – except on a rather surface level – just how a composer's life may explain his music. More often than not we are given two books in one, even when they are interleaved rather than formally separated. And in writing two books in one, the author will be hard pressed to do justice to either. A worthwhile objective would be to translate the ‘life and works’ from a hybrid to a compound genre, and the present introduction, biographical in orientation, is programmatic of such an approach.

A key issue is to evaluate the respective roles of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ biographies in the elucidation of a composer's creative output. For the biographer the task is of course clear-cut: to extract the real from the ideal. But for the music historian it is by no means so simple. The real biography bears directly, though in very complicated ways, on ‘production’ (poiesis) and is therefore a primary cause of the music itself. The ideal biography, on the other hand, bears on ‘reception’ (aesthesis), since it influences substantially the several ways in which the music has been ‘made concrete’ or ‘constituted’ in the world. Both the real and the ideal biographies are therefore of concern to the music historian.