Stravinsky deserves nothing less than an epic biography, and now -- thanks to the Cardiff-based critic and musicologist Stephen Walsh -- he has one. The first volume, published in 1999, was called Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934 and took the composer through the radically innovative works that also became his greatest popular successes ("The Firebird," "Petrushka" and "The Rite of Spring"). This new 709-page installment, entitled Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971 (Knopf, $40), deals with less familiar music but with a more familiar figure: Stravinsky as the respectable face of a long-ago revolution, an incredibly famous man who held the same sort of position in the musical world that Picasso commanded in the visual arts. Even Frank Sinatra wanted his autograph.

Walsh has an uncanny command of the high cultural milieu of the mid-20th century: In addition to Stravinsky and his fellow musicians, characters such as W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley and George Balanchine are evoked indelibly. Indeed, Walsh's account is charged with three qualities that were eternally important to his subject: precision, elegance and grace. The result is one of the best books ever written about a musician.

The American composer Irving Fine (1914-62) fashioned a collection of pristine, eloquent, meticulously crafted works. Fine, whose death at the age of 47 from a heart attack cut short a career of enormous promise, might be described as a neoclassicist with deeply romantic tendencies. In lieu of the desiccated brittleness that typifies much American work in the neoclassical genre, however, we find in Fine's music a lush, heartfelt and seemingly spontaneous lyricism. His best scores -- and Fine was a remarkably consistent composer -- contain hardly a superfluous or ill-considered phrase.

Now Phillip Ramey, another American composer, has written a searching, sympathetic and altogether admirable first biography, Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time (Pendragon, $32). It almost came too late: Since 1999, when Ramey began his research, several important sources -- including Fine's colleagues Arthur Berger and David Diamond and his widow, Verna, -- have died, while others are now in their eighties and nineties.

Ramey does not attempt to turn biography into hagiography. He candidly discusses Fine's bouts with depression, as well as some probable extramarital affairs. Moreover, not all of the assessments of Fine's music are entirely favorable. Diamond thought the Symphony (1962) "forced" and "unnatural," while Ned Rorem objected to the Stravinsky-like "wallops" in its finale: "I can get a little irritated by that sort of thing." Nevertheless, it is hard to disagree with Ramey's ultimate assessment: "Fine can be seen in retrospect as a musical aristocrat, an unusually refined artist well on his way to major status. That this gifted composer should die in middle age, just as a personal style consolidating seemingly contradictory elements was finally in his grasp, is not only tragic but deeply ironic."

Whatever may be said for the late Edward W. Said's other contributions to our intellectual life, his writings about music -- as collected in Musical Elaborations (1991) and in a bizarre book-length dialogue with the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim -- were obscure, pretentious and not even especially erudite. A short, posthumous volume entitled On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (Pantheon, $25) will do nothing to elevate Said's reputation in this field.

Although the Columbia professor reportedly played the piano rather well, he comes across as an unusually pompous tourist in the world of classical music, doing his best to hide his general befuddlement with a tortuously expressed string of dubious "insights" -- most of which, when they can be deciphered, have been accepted wisdom among professional musicians for years. He decides -- by cracky! -- that the late works of Richard Strauss just might have some merit in them and makes repeated reference to something called "Metamorphosis" (can he perhaps mean the great "Metamorphosen" for 23 Solo Strings?). Yet Said feels it incumbent upon himself to set up an elaborate defense of Strauss against the Marxy-craftsy pedantry of Theodor Adorno, who believed that the composer's "ego ideal" was "fully identified with the Freudian genital-character who is uninhibitedly out for his own pleasure." (Such nonsense was not uncommon from Adorno, who also suggested that anybody who might be so vulgar as to whistle a theme from the Brahms First Symphony would be "fetishizing" it.) Said lards further Adorno-speak throughout his writings about Glenn Gould, although he doubts that the pianist "had read Adorno or even heard of him" ( pobrecito !).

Meanwhile, by way of practical criticism, "Gould stood very very high indeed and was easily on a technical level with artists like Michelangeli, Horowitz, Barenboim, Pollini, and Argerich," Said declaims, leaving the reader to wonder idly whether he knew any other names that he might have tossed into this dog's breakfast. He uses the examples of Strauss, Stravinsky and Britten to trash John Corigliano's "Ghosts of Versailles" (1991) -- rather unfair competition for an attractive and inventive pastiche, but there is no evidence that Said ever heard any of its contemporaries. Meanwhile, Mozart's "Così fan tutte" is described as "an opera whose strange lightheartedness hides, or at least underplays, an inner system that is quite severe and amoral in its workings." (Simultaneous light and dark in Mozart? Say it ain't so!) Many more such gaspers can be found in On Late Style .

Reporters usually looked forward to conversations with Joseph Volpe, who recently stepped down as general manager of New York's Metropolitan Opera. Volpe was blunt, aggressive, outspoken and always seemed to be enjoying his job immensely. He not only refused to adopt the surface decorum traditional to the Met but seemed actively hostile to it. Who else but Volpe would have dismissed the soprano Kathleen Battle the way he did, in 1994, not with a lot of perfumed vagaries about "creative differences" but -- bam ! -- because her "unprofessional actions" were "profoundly detrimental to the artistic collaboration among all cast members"?

Now Volpe has written a memoir, The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera (Knopf, $25.95). While the title smacks of typical New York provincial self-importance (on Earth ?), this engaging volume will delight readers for whom opera is not only an art but also an endless fount of good gossip. Plácido, Luciano, Renée and Kiri (no last names necessary) are here, in all their glory and otherwise; Volpe, for his part, is not averse to telling tales out of school.

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