Author(s): Michael Steen

Music

Comprehensive and meticulously researched, Lives and Times of the Great Composers is a lovingly constructed biographical history of the giants of classical music.

Each self-contained chapter narrates the life and background of one or more composers.

It tells the story of Bach, the respectable burgher whose vast output was composed amid petty turf rows in Lutheran Leipzig; the ugly, argumentative (and eventually deaf) Beethoven; and Mozart, whose career began as an infant prodigy and ended with an untimely death shrouded in rumour.

Verdi composed his music while struggling for Italian independence; Brahms rose from the slums of Hamburg to become a hugely successful bourgeois composer; Haydn was born in a tiny cottage and became court composer to the fabulously rich Prince Esterhazy; and Berlioz whose life was transformed by the Romantic revolution of Paris in the 1830s.

Far more objective, more literary (Balzac, Zola, Dostoyevsky and Proust all appear), and full of colour, Lives and Times of the Great Composers is a pleasure to read, a rich portrait of the lives of these giants of European music and the tumultuous societies in which they lived.