text:
Talk:Heitor Villa-Lobos

The Uirapuru spelling war
By modern official Portuguese spelling rules, the word uirapuru does not carry an acute accent (an oxytone terminating in u). It is possible that at the time Villa-Lobos wrote the piece, uirapurú was also an accepted form. Also possible that the spelling in the score reflects a decision by the French editor. If the standard is to refer to a musical piece by its original designation, the occurrence in the list of works should also be corrected. However, when referring to the bird itself (there is one instance), the modern spelling  should be used. Uirapuru, without the diacritical, is already used elsewhere in the Wikipedia. I know, it is nit-picking. -- 201.53.152.184 (talk) 01:25, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

 * Well, you learn something every day. I see from the timeline of reforms in Spelling reforms of Portuguese that this standard must have been established in 1973, 1986, or 1990—in any case long after the composer's death. For what it's worth, the score was published in 1948, by Associated Music Publishers in New York (though it is still possible the editor was French, I suppose). Both this published score and the autograph manuscript dated "5/6/46" in the Leopold Stokowski collection at the University of Pennsylvania Library have the acute accent. It is probably for this reason that the Library of Congress adopted the spelling with the accent as their standard for the title of this composition.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:21, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

 * In Brazil, these spelling rules were adopted in 1943. Before that there was no official orthography.  A more recent law (1971) eliminated some non-essential diacritics such as in the word Choro, which no longer carries the circumflex.  Hard to say if HVL consciously kept his own spelling for the word at the time of publication.  The piece had been written a while before.  In the little material they have online, the Villa-Lobos museum adopts modern spelling for all work titles in Portuguese.  I am not sure if the Wikipedia has a recommendation on the issue. Either way, it looks like this entry is due for a rewrite.  The spelling in text body is not consistent with list of works, which also incomplete. -- 201.53.152.184 (talk) 17:27, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Dear Mr. Kohl (10/31/2007)
En la continuidad de nuestras comunicaciones de Julio de 2007, me permito escribirle en español por las deficiencias que tengo en el uso del idioma Ingles. Como un intento más para que Usted comprenda mejor lo que he tratado de explicarle anteriormente, le envio la siguiente direccion de internet:

http://ronaldpaz.iespana.es

que contiene el documento presentado por mi persona en la Conferencia Villa Lobos celebrada en Paris el año 2002. Agradeciendo sus futuros comentarios, le saluda muy atentamente

Ronald Paz

Biography assessment rating comment
The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Edofedinburgh 01:11, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Dear Mr. Kohl
It is possible that I have not kept the forms from Wikipedia; I request excuses for that reason. When I affirm something I make it with total conviction and sincerity. This drift of the fact that my existence is product of the acts and the decisions that in the past took Heitor Villa-Lobos. In other words, I would not exist if he had not done what he did. Finally, I mean to you that Heitor Villa-Lobos is looking for true friends. He wants to relate his truth, and those that claim to be their friends not allow it. Kindly Ronald Paz

Was Villa-Lobos really sterile?
http://guiadoscuriosos.ig.com.br/index.php?cat_id=52969 internet brasilian source

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)

•	Tuhú era seu apelido de infância. •	 Aos 6 anos, Heitor Villa-Lobos aprendeu a tocar violoncelo com o pai, em uma viola especialmente adaptada. Foi nessa época que compôs a sua primeira peça, Panqueca. •	Dona Noêmia, sua mãe, queria que Villa-Lobos estudasse medicina. Assim, proibiu o menino de estudar piano, com medo de que ele se empolgasse com a música. •	Estudou violão escondido de seus pais, que não aprovavam sua aproximação com os "chorões", músicos que se reuniam para tocar por prazer, em festas e durante o carnaval. •	Em 1915, no Auditório do Jornal do Comércio, Villa-Lobos realizou o primeiro concerto dedicado às suas composições. •	Uma doença venérea o deixou estéril. •	O maestro tinha mania de empinar pipas. Certa vez, na França, ele fez uma pipa de 3 metros. O vento o arrastou junto com o pianista espanhol Tomaz Téran, que participava da brincadeira. •	Ele aprendeu a jogar capoeira. •	Villa-Lobos acabou (por carta) um casamento de 23 anos com Lucília Guimarães em 1936. Logo depois, se casou com Arminda Neves d'Almeida, 25 anos mais jovem que ele. •	Era um mitômano assumido. Uma das histórias mais conhecidas envolvendo seu nome é a de que teria escapado por pouco de ser devorado por índios antropófagos. •	Ele estreou como músico "modernista" na Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922, realizada no Teatro Municipal de São Paulo. Apresentou Sonata nº 2, Danças Características Africanas, Quarteto Simbólico e Impressões da Vida Mundana em meio a vaias e urros da platéia. O mais curioso é que em um de seus concertos entrou de casaca e de chinelos, pois estava com um dos pés machucado. •	Todo o acervo deixado por Villa-Lobos após a morte estão arquivados no Museu Villa-Lobos, que fica no Rio de Janeiro (RJ). São 13 mil documentos, entre cartas, partituras, livros de sua biblioteca pessoal, cartazes e programas de concertos e reportagens publicadas enquanto era vivo.

Started a Villa-Lobos page, my first contribution to Wikipedia. Hope to have the page translated into (at least) Portuguese. - Deanfrey 22:36 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

If you need help...
If you need help, I can translate the article into Portuguese for you!

--Milena 16:46, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)

 * Gavota

Nobody promised it would be easy??

http://www.musica.ufrn.br/gravacoes/escudeiro230703/index.htm

http://www.musica.ufrn.br

But great..

"Best known composer"
I would think that the statement would need verification? Admittedly, I don't know where to find it... Diogenes00 20:57, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

 * My source is Componistenlexicon (Th. Willemze, 1971, in Dutch; English: Composers Lexicon), which states about Villa-Lobos: the greatest composer of the South-American continent. Some more or less independent Web sites:
 * Guild Music Since his death in 1959 Villa-Lobos has been recognised as the great genius of South American music.
 * Encyclopædia Britannica : one of the foremost Latin American composers of the 20th century

 * I can also live with an addition like "of the 20th century" or "during his life time", but there are not many composers from South-America. Are there any other candidates for best known composer of South America? China Crisis 08:43, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

 * Astor Piazzolla. JackofOz 08:47, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

 * I changed best known composer to best known classical composer China Crisis 08:03, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

 * Would anyone be opposed to changing it to "one of the best known..."? Frankly the phrase best known is just not very neutral at all... Harryhoy7 (talk) 05:30, 20 February 2017 (UTC)Harryhoy7

 * Since this phrase has already been changed several times since that discussion eleven years ago, and the current version cites a reliable source, what is wrong with sticking to the source?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:27, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

LOST?
I wonder why the note for the lost pieces really remind me of the title of a tv series :p sentausa 14:47, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Copied?
Compare the article to this article: I think it's copied straight from there. I hate when Wikipedia does this. I find it all over the place. This definitely is not free domain text and needs to be edited. Hazelorb 02:28, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I agreed with this comment, and have done something about it. --RobertG ♬ talk 17:43, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Persistent vandal?
Four times in the past two days a text, apparently claiming (the grammar is so bad that it is hard to tell exactly) that Villa-Lobos fathered an illegitimate daughter in 1935, has been added to this article, and removed by me on grounds of vandalism. Each time, the item concludes with a statement to contact one Ronald Paz, at a yahoo.com email address, for further information, though it is not certain that Mr. Paz is the individual responsible for this persistent reposting. It is possible that this addition was meant sincerely, in which case I ask the anonymous poster (from four different but possibly related addresses, 200.87.183.201, 200.87.183.84, 200.87.181.37, and 200.87.181.244) to bring the discussion to this page.

In case the writer accepts this invitation, I find the following defects:
 * 1) The writer claims that "all 'the official' biographies" state that Villa-Lobos was sterile. These biographies are not named, nor are page references given. I know of only one "official" biography (the brief one published by the Villa-Lobos Museum), and it contains no mention of Villa-Lobos's fertility or lack thereof. Nor do the other biographies I have read (admittedly not every single published one).
 * 2) The citation of a biopic (Villa-Lobos Uma Vida de Paixao, 2000) is not a reliable source of verification for biographical facts.
 * 3) Reference to "docuemnts [sic] in the Congress (Conference) the International Heitor Villa-Lobos, celebrated year 2002 in Paris-France" is vague. A conference-paper citation requires (1) the title of that paper, (2) the author's name, (3) the date on which it was delivered and, ideally, actual or prospective publication data. It is not clear even if these claims were made in a formal paper, or if they may have been made in casual conversations in the corridors or over lunch.
 * 4) I have cross-checked the Villa-Lobos articles on the French, Portuguese, and Finnish Wikipedia sites (the Conference in question was jointly sponsored by institutions in Brazil and Finland), none of which mention these claims.
 * 5) A search of the International Villa-Lobos Conference official website does not turn up any mention of such a paper, nor does a general web-wide search, though five or six other papers presented at the conference are easily found. It seems preposterous that such information, if well-founded, would not have been disseminated for five years following the conference.
 * 6) Given the oblique reference to monetary claims owing to the alleged daughter, legal proceedings must have been filed in a court of law somewhere. Such filings would be public records, and could be cited as references, along with the findings of the court.

It is of course commonplace for such claims to be made in cases where a substantial amount of money may be involved. However, this erstwhile contributor has not even documented where and how these matters have been brought up. If in fact documentation can be brought forward, I will cheerfully concede the merit in these claims. For now, it looks to me like only malicious and unfounded gossip.--Jerome Kohl 01:15, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

 * Definitely keep it out of the article unless a reliable, published source can be found. I've never heard this before either.  Thanks, Antandrus  (talk) 01:50, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Answer to Mr. Kohl
My name is Ronald Paz and I am the author of the note inserted in the page of Wikipedia. I am the grandson of Heitor Villa-Lobos and in that quality I write. Therefore I am not a vandal. I understand your surprise when seeing suddenly an affirmation like which I do. But my story is true and I can say that: You of the personal life of Villa-Lobos nothing knows. You write with sources of third hand; that's not my case. For your information: 1. I was present in Paris in the Conference; 2.I presented officially the document denominated “In memory of Heitor Villa - Lobos, Results of a Research”, where with luxury of details it is related as the existence of the Daughter of Villa Lobos were hidden by the Museum Villa Lobos and in individual by Mrs. Arminda Neves de Almeida. Therefore, one was not conversation in the corridors. Why the conclusions of that Conference were not published?

3. I know all those that participate in this conference: Turibio Santos; Pierre Vidal; Eero Tarasti and much others including the representative of Max Esching: publisher, with who my grandfathers had to subscribe a inescrupulous contract. With these antecedents, I recommend you that before erasing the things one inquires more. Finally, I must say you that I am going to follow insertanto my truth in the page of Wikipedia, because It's my right and You are not the owner of this free encyclopedia Kindly Ronald Paz
 * Mr. Paz, I can see that you are sincere, but the polemical tone you adopt is, as one other editor has pointed out, "not encyclopedic". Removing matter written in such a tone does not require that an editor "inquires more". Rather, it is the responsibility of the contributor to provide adequate documentation, especially when exceptional claims are being made. It is not your "right" to insert just anything at all. On the contrary, it is not only the right but the duty of other editors here to remove undocumented, contentious or dubious material. Please see Wikipedia:Reliable sources, particularly the section titled “Exceptional claims require exceptional sources”. I get the impression that you are not very familiar with Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and so I recommend that you read:
 * Wikipedia:five pillars (also in Spanish and French)
 * as well as three key policies:
 * Neutral point of view (Spanish, French)
 * Verifiability (Spanish, French)
 * No original research (Spanish, French)
 * If you adhere to these guidelines and provide the necessary documentation, there will be no need for anyone to remove your contribution (though of course, like everything else on Wikipedia, anyone can edit the text).--Jerome Kohl 18:53, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Best known
I don't feel strongly enough to put it back, and obviously others disagree with me, but as the main contributor to this article I do feel I need to register that I think this assertion is not even wrong. --RobertG ♬ talk 23:37, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I take it that you are denying any difference between "classical" and "popular" music?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:41, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Not at all :-) I think Piazzola studied with Nadia Boulanger, and his works are in the repertoire of "classical musicians" such as the Katona twins.  --RobertG ♬ talk 09:02, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, Burt Bacharach studied with Milton Babbitt, but that doesn't make him well-known as a classical composer, and Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and "Little Wing" are in the repertoire of "classical musicians" such as the Kronos Quartet, Nigel Kennedy, Michael Nicolella, and the Polish Chamber Orchestra. FWIW, I just checked a web-based classical-music CD outlet and was surprised to find 360 recordings with music by Piazzolla there. Mind you, 148 of them are of his three best-known tangos. The same site lists 471 recordings of Villa-Lobos, if that is anything to go by.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:09, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
 * That's fascinating. I don't think Bacharach's or Hendrix's oeuvres are like Piazzola's.  You'd probably find that most of the hundreds of available recordings of Johann Strauss II are of his ten most popular waltzes, marches and polkas.  To get back to the point - I am fairly certain that Villa-Lobos is not easily the most well-known classical composer from South America.  --RobertG ♬ talk 09:36, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
 * All right, then, accepting that Piazzolla does not fall into this category, who would be Villa-Lobos's closest competitors? Revueltas? Ginastera? Ponce? Gomes? Although all of these are well-known, I can scarcely imagine any of them as serious rivals for fame. There is also the question of what criteria determine "well-known-ness". Would simply removing the word "easily" from the lede satisfy you? Or might it be better to quote Gerard Béhague's New Grove article, which more modestly calls him "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music"?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:16, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I cannot have expressed myself clearly. I still think Piazzola is his "closest competitor" - although that phrase turns it into a beauty contest, which it surely isn't.  I agree with you about the others.  I also think the fact that we can have this discussion makes the lead's assertion about Villa-Lobos and South America into original research (unless there's a reliable source).  I like Béhague's comment very much - and I think that would be much more apposite.  I rank a composer's creative significance as much more notable than his well-known-ness, anyway.  --RobertG ♬ talk 23:49, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, I think we are in agreement at least that the sentence in question amounts to OR. I have changed the lede accordingly, to incorporate Béhague's assessment.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:37, 18 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I concur. Thank you.  --RobertG ♬ talk 09:05, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Why can't the lead (I refuse to write lede) just say Villa-Lobos was a composer? Why must it rank him? By the way, Burt Bacharach did not study with Milton Babbitt; he studied with Martinu and Milhaud. You're probably thinking of Stephen Sondheim, who studied for two years with Milton Babbitt more or less as graduate work. Although Sondheim and Burt Bacharach are around the same age and Bacharach did write one musical, it seems to me pretty strange to confuse the two. Also: Ponce was Mexican. Mexico is in North America, not South America. Mexico doesn't even border South America; there are eight more North American countries in between. In my opinion, Villa-Lobos is far less significant a composer than Ginastera, but since Ginastera was Argentinian, I don't see any basis of comparison, anyway. Is there a Wikipedia article that begins "such and such is the most famous European composer"? The most famous Brazilian composer period, unqualified, was Jobim, but notice that the Wikipedia Jobim article doesn't begin by saying that--with or without genre qualification. No, not only does this article (the Villa-Lobos article) not need to say Villa-Lobos is the most famous anything; it absolutely should not. TheScotch (talk) 05:52, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

About Wright 1992
"Villa-Lobos has become the best-known and most significant Latin American composer of all time." presented at the synopsis of the book on google books http://books.google.com.br/books?id=cFlaAAAAMAAJ&dq=Villa-Lobos+Oxford+Simon+Wright&lr=&ei=xoNFSbv0PJzAMrveod4N —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.26.42.26 (talk) 22:16, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Choir Works
Could someone please add his choir compositions such as Bendita Sabedoria? It seems they are not yet in the list. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.201.70.116 (talk) 06:34, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Work list
I notice that the work list within this article has grown and grown, and yet there is still a note at the head of the section directing the reader to the complete List of compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos. I believe it is usual in cases like this to retain only a short list of the most important or characteristic compositions, or even to list only the most important compositions not already discussed in the article text. What do other editors think?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:40, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

 * I agree. The List of compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos info should not be duplicated. -- Klein zach  02:47, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅ I've now removed the duplicated sections, moving some details to the list. -- Klein zach  03:04, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Infobox
Is there a possibility to add an infobox for this article?--Mishae (talk) 05:48, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * There is always such a possibility, but I personally oppose such a thing, in agreement with the objections raised on WikiProject_Composers.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:05, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * How many people object?--Mishae (talk) 15:08, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I suggest you read this guideline, and this one, and also this one, and then re-phrase your question.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:19, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I miss infoboxes, and other important composers (e.g., Bach and Beethoven) have small infoboxes. In my opinion, they are better to see quick facts like birth/death dates/places, and family associations. Hence, there is no consensus about this. --Rudolf Hellmuth (talk) 13:34, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
 * It is true that some other important composers have infoboxes, but many do not (e.g., Palestrina, Monteverdi, Telemann, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner, Schoenberg). You are correct, there is no consensus across Wikipedia on this, and no consensus for change on this article, either.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:59, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Tagged 5 links as dead
, Tagged 5 links as dead. Cheers! 09:37, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
 * All fixed, now. Thanks for calling my attention to these.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:38, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Heitor Villa-Lobos. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080921190048/http://www.tar-radio.com/myapp/articles/view/130 to http://www.tar-radio.com/myapp/articles/view/130

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 22:51, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Nepomuceno
Villa-Lobos mostly self-taught but taught some by Alberto Nepomuceno? Schissel | Sound the Note! 17:37, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Please expand. I do not find Nepomuceno mentioned anywhere in this article, though his own bio article mentions Villa-Lobos as among his pupils. Is that the point?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:27, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Yes, sorry- I think I was in a hurry at the time but should have just waited. Schissel | Sound the Note! 02:18, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, then, all we need is a reliable source. Caution is indicated, however, given the long history of "reliable sources" on this composer that have proved less than reliable upon closer examination.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:49, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Hrm. Appleby (2014) does mention AN’s “controversial” encouragement of Villa-Lobos and helping VL get some scores published but, not the same thing. Will look. Schissel | Sound the Note! 03:14, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Gerard Béhague in New Grove fails to mention Nepomuceno at all. The other obvious places to look are the biographies by Tarasti, Peppercorn, Negwer, and Wright. Volpe's 2001 dissertation discusses Nepomuceno alongside Gomes and Villa-Lobos, but I can't recall whether any teacher-student relationship is mentioned. —Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:19, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, scratch Volpe's dissertation from the list of sources to investigate. Despite her extensive discussion of Brazilianism in Nepomuceno's music, she never once mentions that Villa-Lobos studied with him.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:29, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

title: Talk:Heitor Villa-Lobos


text:
MCA Records

MCA Records was an American record label owned by MCA Inc. established in 1972, though MCA had released recordings under that name in the UK from the 1960s. The label achieved success in the 1970s through the 1970s, often by acquiring other record labels, from ABC to Motown to Geffen. MCA Inc. became Universal Studios, Inc., in 1996, and the MCA record label was folded into Universal Music Group's Geffen Records in 2003, but Universal's MCA Nashville use the moniker.

Background
The U.S. arm of Britain's Decca Records was established in New York in 1934 In 1937, the owner of Decca, Edward R. Lewis, chose to split off the UK Decca company from the U.S. company (keeping his U.S. Decca holdings), fearing the financial damage that would arise for UK Companies if the emerging hostilities of Nazi Germany should lead to war – correctly foreseeing World War II. Lewis sold the remainder of his American Decca holdings when war did break out. U.S.-based Decca Records kept the rights to the Decca name in North and South America and parts of Asia including Japan. UK Decca owned the rights to the Decca name in the rest of the world. After the war, British Decca formed a new U.S. subsidiary, London Records. During this time, American Decca issued records outside North America on the Coral Records and Brunswick Records labels.

The early years
In 1962, MCA, a talent agency and television production company, entered the recorded music business with the acquisition of American Decca, which became a wholly-owned subsidiary. As American Decca owned Universal Pictures, MCA was forced to exit the talent agency business in order to complete the merger. MCA assumed full ownership of Universal and made it into a top film studio, producing several hits.

In 1966, MCA formed Uni Records and in 1967, purchased Kapp Records which was placed under Uni Records management.

In 1967, Brunswick and Coral were replaced by a new MCA label, which was used to release U.S. Decca and Kapp label material outside North America. Initial activity as MCA Records was based in London and MCA Records UK was formally launched on February 16, 1968. Among the early artists on the MCA label, around 1971, were groups Wishbone Ash, Osibisa, Stackridge and Budgie, and solo artists Tony Christie, Mick Greenwood and Roy Young.

Early MCA UK releases were distributed by Decca, but moved to EMI in 1974. As the U.S. division of MCA Records was not established until 1972, the earliest UK MCA Records material was released in the U.S. on either Kapp or Decca. MCA UK also issued American Brunswick material on the MCA label until 1972, two years after MCA lost control of Brunswick, after which American Brunswick material was issued in the UK on the revived Brunswick label. Uni label material was issued on the Uni label worldwide.

MCA Records formation in Canada and the United States
In 1970, MCA reorganized its Canadian record company Compo Company Ltd. into MCA Records (Canada). In April 1970, former Warner Records president Mike Maitland joined MCA and initially served as Decca's general manager. Maitland was unsuccessful in his attempt to consolidate Warner Records with co-owned Atlantic Records which led to his departure from Warner.

In April 1971, Maitland supervised the consolidation of the New York–based Decca and Kapp labels plus the California-based Uni label into MCA Records based in Universal City, California, with Maitland serving as president. The three labels maintained their identities for a short time, but were retired in favor of the MCA label in 1973. "Drift Away" by Dobie Gray became the final Decca pop label release in the U.S. in 1973. Beginning the same year, the catalogs of Decca, Uni and Kapp were reissued in the U.S. on the MCA label under the supervision of veteran Decca producer Milt Gabler.

Early success
The first MCA Records release in the U.S. was former Uni artist Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" single in 1972, which appeared on a plain black and white label. Immediately following this, the American MCA label used a black with curved rainbow design until the late 1970s. This design was directly inspired by the U.S. Decca label of the 1960s.

In December 1972, Neil Diamond, another Uni artist, reached superstar status with his first MCA release, the live multi-platinum Hot August Night. Elton John's double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was released in October 1973 and was number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 albums chart for eight straight weeks. The management of former Decca artists the Who had formed their own label Track Records in the UK, but were still under contract with MCA for American distribution. The Who's double album Quadrophenia was released by Track/MCA also in October 1973. Quadrophenia peaked at number 2 as it was held back from the number 1 slot by Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Other successful artists on MCA, after the consolidation, included former Kapp artist Cher, and Uni artist Olivia Newton-John. In 1973 MCA released the highly successful soundtrack album to the film The Sting. The movie used the Ragtime music of Scott Joplin, arranged and conducted by Marvin Hamlisch. It won an Academy Award for Best Original Score (MCA issued many other soundtracks to films from Universal, along with some non-Universal films).

One of the most successful MCA artists in this era was the rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, who would become one of the most popular in the Southern rock genre. The group was discovered by Al Kooper and initially released on his Sounds of the South label imprint of MCA. The song "Free Bird" became one of the most popular songs of all time on album-oriented rock radio stations. On Second Helping, the group recorded a song about their relationship with the label called, "Workin' for MCA". Street Survivors was released in October 1977, just prior to a tragic plane crash in which members of the group were either killed or severely injured. The original Street Survivors cover had a picture of the band members surrounded by flames, but this was quickly substituted for a design without flames. Lynyrd Skynyrd's streak of hits ended after the crash. Eventually, three Lynyrd Skynyrd albums reached the double platinum sales level and at least two others reached platinum or gold levels.

During the 1970s and 1980s, MCA profited from reissuing classic early rock and roll recordings made by artists who recorded for the numerous labels absorbed by MCA. One notable example was the 1954 Decca recording "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets, which was featured as the lead track of MCA's number one–charting American Graffiti soundtrack album, and as a single returned to the American top 40 that year, 20 years after it was recorded.

Expansion and struggles
In 1977, MCA president Sidney Sheinberg set up the Infinity Records division, based in New York City with Ron Alexenberg as CEO. Alexenberg had been with the Epic division of CBS Records, now Sony Music Entertainment. The intention was to give MCA a stronger presence on the East Coast. The only big hit the Infinity label had was "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes, a number one single at the end of 1979. Infinity also had some success with Hot Chocolate, Spyro Gyra, New England and TKO. But MCA pulled the plug on Infinity after it failed to sell most of the one million advance copies of an album featuring Pope John Paul II in October 1979. Infinity was fully absorbed by the parent company in 1980.

In 1979, Bob Siner replaced Maitland as MCA Records president. Shortly afterwards, MCA acquired ABC Records along with its subsidiaries Paramount, Dunhill, Impulse!, Westminster, and Dot. ABC had acquired the Paramount and Dot labels when they purchased Gulf+Western's record labels and Famous Music Corp. Thus, MCA now controlled material once owned by Paramount Pictures, the music released by Paramount's record labels, and the pre-1950 films by Paramount as well.

Also included in this deal were recordings controlled by ABC, including albums by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers which were originally released by Shelter Records. Petty was furious about the reassignment of his contract and refused to record for MCA. This led to a series of lawsuits, which resulted in his bankruptcy in 1980. Petty and other ABC/Shelter artists eventually had their contracts transferred to the Backstreet Records label, which was distributed by MCA. ABC Records' independent distributors sued ABC and MCA for $1.3 million in damages for being stuck with unsold ABC recordings they could not return to MCA. The better selling ABC Records catalog albums were reissued on the MCA label.

MCA distribution in Europe and Asia moved to CBS in 1979, while releases in the 1980s were self-distributed, or through WEA. Distribution moved to BMG during the 1990s.

The 1980s
The combined effects of the Infinity Records failure, the purchase of ABC, rising vinyl costs and a major slump in record sales produced tremendous losses for the company between 1979 and 1982. It was not until the mid-1980s that the record labels returned to significant profitability. In late 1980, MCA received negative publicity when it attempted to raise the list price of new releases by top selling artists from $8.98 to $9.98 ($ and $ in dollars respectively). This policy, known as "superstar pricing", ultimately failed. The Xanadu soundtrack album and Gaucho, by former ABC act Steely Dan, were the first releases with the higher list price. Backstreet artist Tom Petty succeeded in his campaign to force MCA to drop prices back to $8.98 for the release of his album Hard Promises, in May 1981.

MCA had a distribution deal with the independent label Unicorn Records, which in turn signed an agreement with another rising independent label, SST Records to manufacture and distribute Black Flag's first album Damaged. Reportedly, MCA executive Al Bergman heard an advance copy of the album and refused to let MCA Distributing Inc. handle it, stating that it was "an anti-parent record". The members of Black Flag found themselves covering the MCA Distributing logo on the first 25,000 copies with a sticker reading "As a parent... I found it an anti-parent record."

SST Records partner Joe Carducci later said that Bergman's comments were actually a red herring for MCA to cut ties with Unicorn, which had not produced any successful releases; the fact that MCA would, not soon afterward, directly commission a new recording of "TV Party" from Black Flag and SST Records for the Repo Man soundtrack seemed to bear this out. Unicorn would later go out of business after going bankrupt, partially the result of a lawsuit between themselves and Black Flag.

Recovery, further expansion and MCA Music Entertainment Group
Irving Azoff became the head of MCA Records in 1983. Azoff is known as an experienced music industry veteran who received credit amongst MCA management and staff for saving the company from bankruptcy.

In 1983, rock musician Frank Zappa negotiated a distribution agreement for his Barking Pumpkin label with MCA. As the records were being manufactured, a woman in the quality control department objected to the lyrics of Zappa's album Thing-Fish. After this MCA cancelled the Zappa contract. At about the same time, Zappa publicly argued with members of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) over censorship and warning stickers for albums with potentially offensive content. The experience with MCA prompted Zappa to create a satirical "WARNING/GUARANTEE" sticker of his own. Thing-Fish was released with Zappa's sticker in December 1984 under a new agreement with Capitol/EMI. Despite the conflict with Zappa, MCA later became the biggest label to oppose the PMRC and the use of warning stickers. In October 1985, Azoff said "Never will you find a sticker on one of our records."

In the 1980s, MCA became commonly nicknamed "Music Cemetery of America" due to a huge surplus of unprofitable records sitting unsold in MCA warehouses. A number of MCA associates, including Azoff and Zappa, disparaged the company in this way.

Starting in 1984, William Knoedelseder wrote a series of articles for the Los Angeles Times about the connections between organized crime and MCA. Knoedelseder told the story of mobster Sal Pisello and the corrupt deals he arranged with MCA for the liquidation sales of unsold cut-out recordings that had been deleted from the MCA catalog. The story was later adapted into the book Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia, which was published in 1993.

The Chess Records catalog was acquired from the remnants of Sugar Hill Records in 1985. Motown Records was bought in 1988. In the late 1980s, MCA formed Mechanic Records as a sub-label for releasing heavy metal music. Bands signed to Mechanic included Voivod, Dream Theater, Bang Tango, and Trixter.

MCA created a new holding company in 1989 called MCA Music Entertainment Group, headed by Al Teller, former President of United Artists Records, and co-chairman of Turf Classics, a concert production company, run by Producer Richard Flanzer. The same year the MCA Inc. parent company was purchased by the Matsushita group.

Azoff resigned from MCA in 1989 to form his own record label, the now-defunct Giant Records. Richard Palmese was named president of MCA Records after Azoff in 1990.

The 1990s
GRP Records and Geffen Records were acquired in 1990. Unlike most of MCA's previous acquisitions, GRP (which began managing MCA's jazz holdings) and Geffen (which became a second mainstream subsidiary) labels kept their identities. MCA sold Motown Records to PolyGram in 1993.

Singer and songrwriter Alanis Morissette became a noteworthy MCA artist in Canada with her debut album in 1991. After her second album in 1992 she was dropped following disagreements in artistic direction. However, the company kept her on their song publishing roster, both being owned by Universal Music. Morissette's next album, Jagged Little Pill (written and produced independently, but released through Warner Music's Maverick Records label) eventually sold more than 30 million copies.

Universal Music Group
In 1995, drinks conglomerate Seagram Company Ltd. acquired 80% of MCA. In November of that year, Teller was fired and replaced by former Warner Music Group head Doug Morris. Palmese left MCA a week later. Afterwards, Jay Boberg was named as the new president of MCA. On December 9, 1996, the new owners dropped the MCA name; the company became Universal Studios, Inc. and its music division, MCA Music Entertainment Group, was renamed Universal Music Group (UMG), headed by Morris.

In 1997, MCA Records adopted a new logo that featured the parent company's former full name, Music Corporation of America. That many younger people had been unaware of what MCA had stood for in the past inspired the new logo. In conjunction with the new logo, the first MCA Records website was launched. In 1998, MCA released the sophomore album Feeling Strangely Fine by Semisonic, which had the number one hit single and video, "Closing Time", about the use of alcohol in local night clubs and taverns.

On May 21, 1998, Seagram acquired PolyGram (owner of British Decca) from Philips and merged it with Universal Music Group. Unlike several labels under PolyGram and UMG, who faced closure and job cuts of employees, MCA was the only label that was not affected by the merger. When Seagram's drinks business was bought by France-based Pernod Ricard, its media holdings (including Universal) were sold to Vivendi which became Vivendi Universal which was later renamed back to Vivendi SA after selling most of the entertainment division (which included Universal Pictures) to General Electric. Morris continued to head the combined company, still called Universal Music Group.

MCA label phaseout
On January 16, 2003, Jay Boberg resigned from his position as president of MCA Records. Boberg's resignation arrived in the wake of slumping sales at MCA, which had seen the label's overall album market share decline to just 2.61% in 2002, down from 9% the previous year. His demise was hastened by the relative commercial failure of Shaggy's Lucky Day, released in October 2002, which MCA hoped would sell well enough to turn around their declining fortunes. Richard Nichols, manager of The Roots, felt that MCA had been attempting to spend lots of money on different projects, and subsequently many acts on MCA were "underfinanced" by the label, leading to poor sales. Rob Hitt of Midtown (who was signed to MCA through Drive-Thru Records) stated that MCA had lost a substantial amount of money that year from investing in several unsuccessful bands.

Management of the label was subsequently handed over to the Interscope Geffen A&M umbrella label and Jimmy Iovine, although UMG chairman Doug Morris promised that MCA would continue to operate as a "full-service, free standing label". Craig Lambert, previously the vice president of the label, was named as the interim head of MCA, with a successor expected to be chosen within a few months. Following Boberg's resignation, it was rumoured that MCA could possibly be merged into Universal Records, something which would have given the latter, New York City–based label a stronger presence in the West Coast of the United States.

On May 20, 2003, insider sources at Universal reporting to Billboard revealed that the MCA label was to be absorbed by sister UMG label Geffen Records by the end of the year. The reported reason behind the MCA brand phaseout was due to declining sales, as well as the MCA brand becoming "tarnished" by "a history of acquisitions and mergers". On June 9, 2003, MCA laid off 75 of their staff, equivalent to a third of their personnel, although no employees from Geffen were let go. Geffen's president, Jordan Schur, was named president of the newly merged entity, which continued under the Geffen branding. In the subsequent months, the MCA name was phased out entirely. The last album to be released under the MCA Records branding was Twisted Method's Escape from Cape Coma, which was released on July 15, 2003.

Today Interscope Capitol Labels Group and Universal Music Enterprises manage MCA's rock, pop, and urban back catalogues (including those from ABC Records and Famous Music Group) in conjunction with Geffen – UME and Geffen have re-released various albums from MCA in the years since, as well as several compilations. Its country music label MCA Nashville Records is still in operation, and is one of the only businesses using the MCA trademark as of 2016 along with MCA Records France (imprint of Universal Music France). MCA's jazz catalogue is managed by Verve Records (through the Impulse! and GRP imprints, depending on whether the recording was acquired from ABC or not), while its classical music catalogue is managed by Deutsche Grammophon. MCA's musical theatre catalogue is managed by Decca Records on its Decca Broadway imprint.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: MCA Records


text:
Rebecca West

Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason (first published as a magazine article in 1945 and then expanded to the book in 1947), later The New Meaning of Treason (1964), a study of the trial of the British fascist William Joyce and others; The Return of the Soldier (1918), a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows (1956), This Real Night (published posthumously in 1984), and Cousin Rosamund (1985). Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959; in each case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic". She took the pseudonym "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She was a recipient of the Benson Medal.

Biography
Rebecca West was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield in 1892 in London, England, and grew up in a home full of intellectual stimulation, political debate, lively company, books and music. Her mother, Isabella, a Scotswoman, was an accomplished pianist but did not pursue a musical career after her marriage to Charles Fairfield. The Anglo-Irish Charles had been a Confederate stretcher-bearer at the siege of Richmond in the US Civil War, and had returned to the UK to become a journalist of considerable reputation but financial incompetence. He deserted his family when Cicily was eight years old. He never rejoined them, and died impoverished and alone in a boarding house in Liverpool in 1906, when Cicily was 14. The rest of the family moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Cicily was educated at George Watson's Ladies College. She had to leave school in 1907 due to a bout of tuberculosis. She chose not to return after recovering from the illness, later describing her schooling at Watson's as akin to a "prison".

West had two older sisters. Letitia ("Lettie"), who was the best educated of the three, became one of the first fully qualified female doctors in Britain, as well as a barrister at the Inns of Court. Winifred ("Winnie"), the middle sister, married Norman Macleod, Principal Assistant Secretary in the Admiralty, and eventually director general of Greenwich Hospital. Winnie's two children, Alison and Norman, became closely involved in Rebecca's life as she got older; Alison Macleod would achieve a literary career of her own. West trained as an actress in London, taking the name "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She and Lettie became involved in the women's suffrage movement, participating in street protests. Meanwhile, West worked as a journalist for the feminist weekly Freewoman and the Clarion, drumming up support for the suffragette cause.

Affairs and motherhood
In September 1912, West accused the famously libertine writer H. G. Wells of being "the Old Maid among novelists." This was part of a provocative review of his novel Marriage published in Freewoman, an obscure and short-lived feminist weekly review. The review attracted Wells's interest and an invitation to lunch at his home. The two writers became lovers in late 1913, despite Wells being both married and twenty-six years older than West. Their 10-year relationship produced a son, Anthony West, born on 4 August 1914. Wells was behind her move to Marine Parade, Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, where she lived between 1917 and 1919. Their friendship lasted until Wells's death in 1946.

West is also said to have had relationships with Charlie Chaplin, newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, and journalist John Gunther.

Early career and marriage
West established her reputation as a spokeswoman for feminist and socialist causes and as a critic, turning out essays and reviews for The New Republic, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, and many more newspapers and magazines. George Bernard Shaw said in 1916 that "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely." During the 1920s, West began a lifelong habit of visits to the United States to give lectures, meet artists, and get involved in the political scene. She was a great friend of the novelist G. B. Stern, and Stern and Clemence Dane stayed with her in America in 1924. There, she befriended CIA founder Allen Dulles, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Ross of The New Yorker, and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., among many other significant figures of the day. Her lifelong fascination with the United States culminated in 1948 when President Truman presented her with the Women's Press Club Award for Journalism, calling her "the world's best reporter."

In 1930, at the age of 37, she married a banker, Henry Maxwell Andrews, and they remained nominally together, despite one public affair just before his death in 1968. West's writing brought her considerable wealth, and, by 1940, she owned a Rolls-Royce and a grand country estate, Ibstone House, in the Chiltern Hills of southern England. During World War II, West housed Yugoslav refugees in the spare rooms of her blacked-out manor, and she used the grounds as a small dairy farm and vegetable plot, agricultural pursuits that continued long after the war had ended.

Later life
As West grew older, she turned to broader political and social issues, including mankind's propensity to inflict violent injustice on itself. Before and during World War II, West travelled widely, collecting material for books on travel and politics. In 1936–38, she made three trips to Yugoslavia, a country she came to love, seeing it as the nexus of European history since the late Middle Ages. Her non-fiction masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an amalgamation of her impressions from these trips. New York Times reviewer Katherine Woods wrote: "In two almost incredibly full-packed volumes one of the most gifted and searching of modern English novelists and critics has produced not only the magnification and intensification of the travel book form, but, one may say, its apotheosis." West was assigned by Ross' magazine to cover the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker, an experience she memorialized in the book A Train of Powder. In 1950, she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also went to South Africa in 1960 to report on apartheid in a series of articles for The Sunday Times, particularly regarding a prominent trial for a seditious uprising aiming to establish Communist rule. She accidentally misidentified a South African judge for some questions put by another judge and was sued for libel along with the Sunday Times whose editor, Harry Hodson, failed to support West. She wrote "My problem is complicated by the fact that the defence, the people who would naturally be against the Judge and for me, are mostly Communist and won't lift a finger for me. It worries me a lot. It's so hard to work with this hanging over me." She felt her only support was her friends, the anti-apartheid politician Bernard Friedman and his wife, with whom she stayed in Johannesburg. "I will get over this case. But it isn't easy to feel that some people are for no reason that you know of possessed by an intention to ruin you; and I also felt I was letting you down in South Africa. I have been deeply grateful for all the kindness and sympathy you have shown me and I thought of Tall Trees as a warm place in a chilly world."

She travelled extensively well into old age. In 1966 and 1969, she undertook two long journeys to Mexico, becoming fascinated by the indigenous culture of the country and its mestizo population. She stayed with actor Romney Brent in Mexico City and with Katherine (Kit) Wright, a long-time friend, in Cuernavaca.

Old age
Her husband became both sleepy and inattentive as he got older. The sleepiness led to a car accident where no one was hurt but Henry was charged with dangerous driving. He became obsessed with the Norwegian ballerina Gerd Larsen; he would refuse to travel with West, instead preferring to return to London to be with Larsen. West initially considered this to be purely her husband's infatuation, but came to think that Larsen was driven by money. At her husband's funeral West had the upsetting problem of Larsen's request to be among the mourners, even though she had only known him for 18 months. Henry's will left £5,000 for Larsen. After her husband's death in 1968, West discovered that he had been unfaithful with other women.

After she was widowed, she moved to London, where she bought a spacious apartment overlooking Hyde Park. Unfortunately, it was next door to the Iranian embassy. During the May 1980 incident, West, then 87, had to be evacuated. In the last two decades of her life, West kept up a very active social life, making friends with Martha Gellhorn, Doris Lessing, Bernard Levin, comedian Frankie Howerd, and film star and director Warren Beatty, who filmed her for the production Reds, a biography of journalist John Reed and his connection with the Russian Revolution. She also spent time with scholars such as Jane Marcus and Bonnie Kime Scott, who began to chronicle her feminist career and varied work. She wrote at an unabated pace, penning masterful reviews for The Sunday Telegraph, publishing her last novel The Birds Fall Down (1966), and overseeing the film version of the story by BBC in 1978. The last work published in her lifetime was 1900 (1982). 1900 explored the last year of Queen Victoria's long reign, which was a watershed in many cultural and political respects.

At the same time, West worked on sequels to her autobiographically inspired novel The Fountain Overflows (1957); although she had written the equivalent of two more novels for the planned trilogy, she was never satisfied with the sequels and did not publish them. She also tinkered at great length with an autobiography, without coming to closure, and started scores of stories without finishing them. Much of her work from the late phase of her life was published posthumously, including Family Memories (1987), This Real Night (1984), Cousin Rosamund (1985), The Only Poet (1992), and Survivors in Mexico (2003). Unfinished works from her early period, notably Sunflower (1986) and The Sentinel (2001) were also published after her death, so that her oeuvre was augmented by about one third by posthumous publications.

Relationship with her son
West's relationship with her son, Anthony West, was not a happy one. The rancour between them came to a head when Anthony, himself a gifted writer, his father's biographer (H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life [1984]), and a novelist, published Heritage (1955), a fictionalised autobiography. West never forgave her son for depicting in Heritage the relationship between an illegitimate son and his two world-famous, unmarried parents, and for portraying the mother in unflattering terms. The depiction of West's alter ego in Heritage as a deceitful, unloving actress (West had trained as an actress in her youth) and poor caregiver so wounded West that she broke off relations with her son and threatened to sue any publisher who would bring out Heritage in England. She suppressed an English edition of the novel, which was only published there after her death, in 1984. Although there were temporary rapprochements between her and Anthony, a state of alienation persisted between them, causing West grief until her dying hour. She fretted about her son's absence from her deathbed, but when asked whether he should be sent for, answered: "perhaps not, if he hates me so much."

Death

West suffered from failing eyesight and high blood pressure in the late 1970s, and became increasingly frail. Her last months were mostly spent in bed, at times delirious and other times lucid; she complained that she was dying too slowly. She died on 15 March 1983, and is buried at Brookwood Cemetery, Woking.

Upon hearing of her death, William Shawn, then editor in chief of The New Yorker, said: "Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have a lasting place in English literature. No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of the world more intelligently."

She is honoured with a blue plaque at Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, her childhood home which also provided the setting for her novel The Judge.

Politics
West grew up in a home filled with discussions of world affairs. Her father was a journalist who often involved himself in controversial issues. He brought home Russian revolutionaries and other political activists, and their debates helped to form West's sensibility, which took shape in novels such as The Birds Fall Down, set in pre-revolution Russia. But the crucial event that moulded West's politics was the Dreyfus affair. The impressionable Rebecca learned early on just how powerful was the will to persecute minorities and to subject individuals to unreasonable suspicion based on flimsy evidence and mass frenzy. West had a keen understanding of the psychology of politics, how movements and causes could sustain themselves on the profound need to believe or disbelieve in a core of values—even in contradiction of reality.

Although she was a militant feminist and active suffragette, and published a perceptive and admiring profile of Emmeline Pankhurst, West also criticised the tactics of Pankhurst's daughter, Christabel, and the sometimes doctrinaire aspects of the Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).

The first major test of West's political outlook was the Bolshevik Revolution. Many on the left saw it as the beginning of a new, better world, and the end of the crimes of capitalism. West regarded herself as a member of the left, having attended Fabian socialist summer schools as a girl. Yet to West, both the Revolution and the revolutionaries were suspect. Even before the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, West expressed her doubts that events in Russia could serve as a model for socialists in Britain or anywhere else.

West paid a heavy price for her cool reaction to the Russian Revolution; her positions increasingly isolated her. When Emma Goldman visited Britain in 1924 after seeing Bolshevik violence firsthand, West was exasperated that British intellectuals ignored Goldman's testimony and her warning against Bolshevik tyranny.

For all her censures of communism, however, West was hardly an uncritical supporter of Western democracies. Thus in 1919–1920, she excoriated the US government for deporting Goldman and for the infamous Palmer Raids. She was also appalled at the failure of Western democracies to come to the aid of Republican Spain, and she gave money to the Republican cause.

A staunch anti-fascist, West attacked both the Conservative governments of her own country for appeasing Adolf Hitler and her colleagues on the left for their pacifism. Neither side, in her view, understood the evil Nazism posed. Unlike many on the left, she also distrusted Joseph Stalin. To West, Stalin had a criminal mentality that communism facilitated. She was outraged when the Allies switched their loyalties as to Yugoslav resistance movements by deciding in 1943 to start backing the Communist-led Partisans led by Tito in Yugoslavia, thus abandoning their support of Draža Mihailović's Chetniks, whom she considered the legitimate Yugoslav resistance. She expressed her feelings and opinions on the Allies' switch in Yugoslavia by writing the satirical short story titled "Madame Sara's Magic Crystal", but decided not to publish it upon discussion with Orme Sargent, Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. Writing in her diary, West mentioned that Sargent had persuaded her that "the recognition of Tito was made by reason of British military necessities, and for no other reason." Following Sargent's claim, she described her decision not to publish the story as an expression of "personal willingness to sacrifice myself to the needs of my country." After the war, West's anti-Communism hardened as she saw Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other Eastern and Central European states succumb to Soviet domination.

In 1951 she provided a critical review of Alistair Cooke's sympathetic portrait of Alger Hiss during his postwar trials from a classical liberalism point of view. It is not surprising in this context that West reacted to US Senator Joseph McCarthy differently from her colleagues. They saw a demagogue terrorising liberals and leftists with baseless accusations of Communist conspiracy. West saw an oaf blundering into the minefield of Communist subversion. For her, McCarthy was right to pursue Communists with fervour, even if his methods were roughshod, though her mild reaction to McCarthy provoked powerful revulsion among those on the left and dismay even among anti-Communist liberals. She refused, however, to amend her views.

Although West's anti-communism earned the high regard of conservatives, she never considered herself one of them. In postwar Britain, West voted Labour and welcomed the Labour landslide of 1945 but spoke out against domination of the Labour Party by British trade unions, and thought left-wing politicians such as Michael Foot unimpressive. She had mixed feelings about the Callaghan government. West admired Margaret Thatcher, not for Thatcher's policies, but for Thatcher's achievement in rising to the top of a male-dominated sphere. She admired Thatcher's willingness to stand up to trade union bullying.

In the end, West's anti-communism remained the centrepiece of her politics because she so consistently challenged the communists as legitimate foes of the status quo in capitalist countries. In West's view, communism, like fascism, was merely a form of authoritarianism. Communists were under party discipline, and therefore could never speak for themselves; West was a supreme example of an intellectual who spoke for herself, no matter how her comments might injure her. Indeed, few writers explicitly acknowledged how much West's embrace of unpopular positions hurt her on the left. A whole generation of writers abandoned West and refused to read her, as Doris Lessing suggested.

Religion
West's parents had her baptised into the Church of England two months after birth and she considered herself a Christian, though an unconventional believer. At times, she found God to be wicked; at other times she considered him merely ineffectual and defeated. However, she revered Christ as the quintessentially good man, she had great respect for the literary, pictorial, and architectural manifestations of the Christian ethos, and she considered faith a valid tool to grapple with the conundrums of life and the mysteries of the cosmos. Although her writings are full of references to the Bible and ecclesiastical history, she was essentially anti-doctrinaire and occasionally blasphemous. In 1926 she expressed the unorthodox belief that "Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation." Moreover, she rejected specific articles of belief such as the virgin birth, Original sin, the Atonement, and Providence. Her contribution to Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Letters Series, Letter to a Grandfather (1933), is a declaration of "my faith, which seems to some unfaith" disguised as philosophical fiction. Written in the midst of the Great Depression, Letter to a Grandfather traces the progressive degeneration of the notion of Providence through the ages, concluding skeptically that "the redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it." As for the Atonement, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is in part meant as a refutation of that very doctrine, which she saw as having sparked a fatal obsession with sacrifice throughout the Christian era and, specifically, as having prompted Neville Chamberlain to formulate his policy of appeasement, which she vehemently opposed. She wrote:"All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing ... [Augustine] developed a theory of the Atonement which was pure nonsense, yet had the power to convince ... This monstrous theory supposes that God was angry with man for his sins and that He wanted to punish him for these, not in any way that might lead to his reformation, but simply by inflicting pain on him; and that He allowed Christ to suffer this pain instead of man and thereafter was willing on certain terms to treat man as if he had not committed these sins. This theory flouts reason at all points, for it is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross."

World War II shocked her into a more conventional belief: "I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them." In the early 1950s, she thought she had a mystical revelation in France and actively tried to convert to Catholicism. There was a precedent in her family for this action, as her sister, Letitia, had earlier converted to Catholicism, thereby causing quite a stir, but West's attempt was short-lived, and she confessed to a friend: "I could not go on with being a Catholic ... I don't want, I can't bear to, become a Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and I cannot believe that I am required to pay such a price for salvation." Her writings of the 1960s and early 1970s again betray a profound mistrust towards God: "The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him."

Alongside her fluctuating Christianity, West was fascinated with Manichaeanism. She describes the Manichean idea that the world is a mixture of two primeval kingdoms, one of light the other of darkness, as an "extremely useful conception of life" affirming that a "fusion of light and darkness" is "the essential human character." On the other hand, West criticised "the strictly literal mind of the founder [of Manichaeanism] and his followers" and what she perceived as the meanness of Christian heretics who adopted Manichaean ideas. West states that "the whole of modern history could be deduced from the popularity of this heresy in Western Europe: its inner sourness, its preference for hate over love and for war over peace, its courage about dying, its cowardice about living." Regarding the suppression of Manichaean heresies by the Christian authorities West says that whilst "it is our tendency to sympathise with the hunted hare... much that we read of Western European heretics makes us suspect that here the quarry was less of a hare than a priggish skunk." Nonetheless, Manichean influence persists in an unpublished draft of West's own memoirs where she writes: "I had almost no possibility of holding faith of any religious kind except a belief in a wholly and finally defeated God, a hypothesis which I now accept but tried for a long time to reject, I could not face it."

West's interest in Manichaeanism reflects her lifelong struggle with the question of how to deal with dualisms. At times she appears to favour the merging of opposites, for which Byzantium served as a model: "church and state, love and violence, life and death, were to be fused again as in Byzantium." More dominant, however, was her tendency to view the tensions generated in the space between dualistic terms as life-sustaining and creative; hence, her aversion to homosexuality and her warning not to confuse the drive for feminist emancipation with the woman's desire to become like a man. Her insistence on the fundamental difference between men and women reveals her essentialism, but it also bespeaks her innate Manichaean sensibility. She wanted respect and equal rights for women, but at the same time she required that women retain their specifically feminine qualities, notably an affinity with life: "Men have a disposition to violence; women have not. If one says that men are on the side of death, women on the side of life, one seems to be making an accusation against men. One is not doing that." One reason why she does not want to make an accusation against men is that they are simply playing their assigned role in a flawed universe. Only love can alleviate destructive aspects of the sex-antagonism: "I loathe the way the two cancers of sadism and masochism eat into the sexual life of humanity, so that the one lifts the lash and the other offers blood to the blow, and both are drunken with the beastly pleasure of misery and do not proceed with love's business of building a shelter from the cruelty of the universe." In addition to the operations of love, female emancipation is crucial to removing the moral, professional, and social stigma associated with the notion of the "weaker sex," without trying to do away altogether with the temperamental and metaphysical aspects of the gender dualism itself. Thus, the "sex war" described in West's early short story "Indissoluble Matrimony" (1914) elevates the female character, Evadne, in the end because she accepts the terms of the contest without superficially trying to "win" that war.

The task of reconciling dualisms can also be seen in West's political propensities. As Bernard Schweizer has argued: "St. Augustine and Schopenhauer emphasized the fallenness of human life, implying a quietistic stance that could be confused with conservatism, while the Reclus brothers [famous French anarchists] urged her to revolt against such pessimistic determinism. West's characteristically heroic personal and historic vision is a result of these two contending forces." West's conviction that humanity will only fulfill its highest potentials if it adheres to the principle of process reflects the same preoccupation: "Process is her most encompassing doctrine," states Peter Wolfe. "Reconciling her dualism, it captures the best aspects of the male and female principles."

Cultural references
Long time book reviewer and senior editor at Time, Whittaker Chambers, considered West "a novelist of note ... a distinguished literary critic ... above all ... one of the greatest of living journalists."

Virginia Woolf questioned Rebecca West being labelled as an "arrant feminist" because she offended men by saying they are snobs in chapter two of A Room of One's Own: "[W]hy was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?"

Bill Moyers's interview "A Visit With Dame Rebecca West," recorded in her London home when she was 89, was aired by PBS in July 1981. In a review of the interview, John O'Connor wrote that "Dame Rebecca emerges as a formidable presence. When she finds something or somebody the adjective suddenly becomes withering."

West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier, was turned into a major motion picture in 1982, directed by Alan Bridges, starring Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie. More recently, an adaptation of The Return of the Soldier for the stage by Kelly Younger titled Once a Marine took West's theme of shell-shock-induced amnesia and applied it to a soldier returning from the war in Iraq with PTSD.

There have been two plays about Rebecca West produced since 2004. That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers, by Carl Rollyson, Helen Macleod, and Anne Bobby, is a one-woman monologue in which an actress playing Rebecca West recounts her life through some of her most famous articles, letters, and books. Tosca's Kiss, a 2006 play by Kenneth Jupp, retells West's experience covering the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker.

Robert D. Kaplan's influential book Balkan Ghosts (1994) is an homage to West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), which he calls "this century's greatest travel book."

In February 2006, BBC broadcast a radio version of West's novel The Fountain Overflows, dramatized by Robin Brook, in six 55-minute installments.

Fiction

 * 1914 – Indissoluble Matrimony, a controversial short story which was first published in Blast No. 1. Edited by Yolanda Morató for the Spanish publishing house Zut, it was also published in the Spanish edition of Blast No. 1 (Madrid: Juan March Foundation, 2010). This novella challenges many issues about feminism and women's involvement in politics in pre-war Britain.
 * 1918 – The Return of the Soldier, the first World War I novel written by a woman, about a shell-shocked, amnesiac soldier returning from World War I in hopes of being reunited with his first love, a working-class woman, instead of continuing to live with his upper-class wife.
 * 1922 – The Judge, a brooding, passionate novel combining Freudian Oedipal themes with suffragism and an existential take on cosmic absurdity.
 * 1929 – Harriet Hume, a modernist story about a piano-playing prodigy and her obsessive lover, a corrupt politician.
 * 1935 – The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels, contains the short story "The Salt of the Earth," featuring Alice Pemberton, whose obsessive altruism becomes so smothering that her husband plots her murder. This was adapted for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour as "The Paragon" starring Joan Fontaine (season 1, episode 20) in 1963. An additional story from the collection, "There is No Conversation", is the tale of a romance as told in hindsight by both parties, one a caddish Frenchman and the other a coarse American woman. This story was adapted for an hour-long radio drama in 1950 on NBC University Theatre and featured a commentary on West's story and writing skills by Katherine Anne Porter.
 * 1936 – The Thinking Reed, a novel about the corrupting influence of wealth even on originally decent people. Perhaps a disguised self-critique of her own elegant lifestyle.
 * 1956 – The Fountain Overflows, a semi-autobiographical novel weaving a fascinating cultural, historical, and psychological tapestry of the first decade of the 20th century, reflected through the prism of the gifted, eccentric Aubrey family.
 * 1966 – The Birds Fall Down, spy thriller based on the deeds of the historical double agent Yevno Azef.
 * 1984 – This Real Night, sequel to The Fountain Overflows published posthumously
 * 1985 – Cousin Rosamund, final, unfinished installment of the "Aubrey Trilogy" published posthumously
 * 1986 – Sunflower, published posthumously, about a tense love-relationship between an actress and a politician, reminiscent of West's relationship with H. G. Wells.
 * 2002 – The Sentinel, edited by Kathryn Laing and published posthumously, West's very first extended piece of fiction, an unfinished novel about the suffragist struggle in Britain, including grim scenes of female incarceration and force-feeding.

Non-fiction

 * 1916 – Henry James
 * 1928 – The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews, a blend of modernist literary criticism and cognitive science, including a long essay explaining why West disliked James Joyce's Ulysses, though she judged it an important book
 * 1931 – Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log
 * 1932 – Arnold Bennett Himself, John Day
 * 1933 – St. Augustine, first psycho-biography of the Christian Church Father
 * 1934 – The Modern Rake's Progress (co-authored with cartoonist David Low)
 * 1941 – Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a 1,181-page classic of travel literature, giving an account of Balkan history and ethnography, and the significance of Nazism, structured around her trip to Yugoslavia in 1937
 * 1949 – The Meaning of Treason, edit new 1964 – The New Meaning of Treason
 * 1955 – A Train of Powder
 * 1958 – The Court and the Castle: some treatments of a recurring theme, excellent revisionist interpretations of literary classics, including Hamlet and Kafka's stories
 * 1963 – The Vassall Affair
 * 1982 – 1900, cultural history and fascinating "thick description" of this pivotal year
 * 1982 – The Young Rebecca, West's early, radical journalism for The Freewoman and Clarion, edited by Jane Marcus
 * 1987 – Family Memories: An Autobiographical Journey, West's autobiographical musings which remained unpublished during her life, assembled and edited by Faith Evans
 * 2000 – The Selected Letters of Rebecca West, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott
 * 2003 – Survivors in Mexico, posthumous work about West's two trips to Mexico in 1966 and 1969, edited by Bernard Schweizer
 * 2005 – Woman as Artist and Thinker, re-issues of some of West's best essays, together with her short-story "Parthenope"
 * 2010 – The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose,

title: Rebecca West