Henry Malherbe

His musings over deep things, his fragmentary, intense picturings of action or character, have the meaning of poetry and are expressed in its language.

… for his accounts of agony, grief, death, the grappling of the mind with horror – he finds words of bare simplicity.

His interview with Claude Debussy in 1911 is quoted extensively by the composer's biographer Léon Vallas;[9] his criticisms of the Conservatoire de Paris for what he saw as its reactionary agenda and declining standards were reported in Britain and the US, in The Times and by Richard Aldrich, music critic of The New York Times.

[11] In his book about Bizet's Carmen, published in 1951, Malherbe offered what the journal Hommes et mondes called an analysis "of rare lucidity" of the origins, libretto and score of the opera, and presented hitherto unpublished information about the circumstances of the composer's early death; in this Malherbe raised the possibility that unhappy in love and in despair at "the conspiracy of critics who had condemned Carmen", Bizet may not have died of illness but had killed himself.

His biography of Schubert (1949) was criticised in Music & Letters for "sketches circumstantially describing scenes for which we have not a shred of evidence.