Nicolas Dufetel, author of a thesis on the religious music of Franz Liszt, is a researcher at the CNRS (IREMUS: Institute for Research in Musicology). His work is devoted to Liszt, Wagner, and more generally to the 19th century and to questions of aesthetics, analysis, and epistemology. In particular, he published the first edition of Liszt's book on Wagner (Three operas by Richard Wagner, Actes Sud) and the collective work Liszt et le son d'Erard (Villa Medici-Giulini) which he directed was awarded the Prix des Muses. A former Visiting Scholar at the BNF, he was a Fellow of Harvard University in 2010 and conducted a postdoctoral fellowship of the Humboldt Foundation at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft in Weimar-Iena between 2010 and 2012.
Professor of musical culture at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional d'Angers from 2010 to 2015, he teaches music history at the Université catholique de l'Ouest. He has published a collection of thoughts and reflections by Liszt, Tout le Ciel en musique. Pensées intempestives (Le Passeur) and prepares the edition of the correspondence between Liszt and the Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Saxe-Weimar (French Society of Musicology) and the French translation of Lina Ramann's Liszt Paedagogium. Since 2018, he has been teaching at the Julliard School in New York (doctoral seminar).