Derrick Puffett

Derrick Robert Puffett (Oxford, 30 November 1946 – Cambridge, 14 November 1996) was an English musicologist and editor whose analytical work was distinguished by its elegance and sense of humour. His career unfolded at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where he combined teaching with editing and translating texts on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music.

He studied music at Oxford, graduating in 1967. After serving as a research fellow at Wolfson College, he earned his doctorate in 1976 with a thesis on the song cycles of Othmar Schoeck, supervised by Joseph Kerman and Frederick Sternfeld. He continued teaching at Oxford and working as a freelance writer until 1984, when he was appointed to a professorship at Cambridge. There he also directed music studies and was a fellow of St John's College. During this period he edited nine volumes of the journal Music Analysis (1987–1995), wrote books on Richard Strauss's Salome and Elektra (1989–1990), and produced several translations of authors such as Dahlhaus, Nattiez, Schenker and Berg, two of them in collaboration with Alfred Clayton.

During his twenty years as a writer, Puffett studied musical texts from the late nineteenth century, such as those of Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Mahler and Bruckner, and from the first third of the twentieth century, among them Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Schmidt and Schreker. Although his planned analytical study of Elgar was never completed, he published work on twentieth-century English composers such as Bax, Tippett, Goehr and Holloway.

His writing earned him a recognition that was unusual among analysts. According to his colleagues, he succeeded in restoring a literary dimension to technical musicology, combining a humanity and common sense that were rare in his discipline. He was demanding of himself and of others: he would not accept a claim that the ear could not verify. He suffered from muscular dystrophy from childhood, and as his illness progressed, his prose became sharper and more sparkling. His last works include a fantasy on early Webern, a study of Debussy, an analysis of Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, and an unfinished text on the adagio of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, published posthumously.