I sent Gilbert a couple of tunes today. Yesterday AK's Wine of Silence arrived. It s very impressive and you can see how it finds itself in the charts. The precise production path is not 100% clear to me and the last phase seems to have added an extra layer of magic.

The Cambridge Companion to Debussy also arrived. Having read the chapter on Debussy and Eroticism I decided to order the book on Wagner and Eroticism which I hope arrives before I hear the Valkyries in Fulham next Friday. The V is the 2nd in the Ring cycle but was the 3rd to be written. Siegfried's mother and father feature prominently and it emerges that the boss god, Wotan, has ambivalent feelings about them. Brunnhilde is one of the Valkyries who helps S's parents and is punished as a result.

The CCD introduced me to the link between P Louys and a girl he met in North Africa via Andre Gide. It seems that she is the muse which provoked the Bilitis poems. D does not seem to have been wholly pleasant character.

The CCD has also made me aware of a more accurate chronology for D's music whereby compositions that I think of as being middle-period are actually rather later. For example the 1st book of the Preludes emerges in 1910 and the 2nd book in 1913. The Epigraphes Antiques appear in 1914.