Author: David Hackett

Few figures in nineteenth century classical music have divided opinion as Franz Liszt did. It seemed you either revered or ridiculed him, and quite often for the same reasons. And yet you couldn’t ignore him. In the 1850s, he was probably the most important composer in Europe. He was certainly one of the most innovative …

Once regarded as the doyen of Danish music, Niels Gade was a man who always seemed to know how to make the best of himself and his circumstances. Reliable, hard-working, even-tempered and adaptable, he was popular with almost everyone who knew him – “the clever, good-natured Niels Gade” …

Despite his status as one of Europe’s best-loved and most iconic opera composers, Giuseppe Verdi also had a reputation for being the kind of man you did not mess with. It was a side to him his various collaborators – impresarios, librettists, singers or publishers – would all come to accept over time …

Things seemed to be going well for Robert Schumann. His career was flourishing, while marriage and fatherhood appeared to have stabilized his once youthful waywardness: “I have learned to command my music and myself better”, he declared …

Long before Justin Bieber, Tom Jones, the Beatles or Frank Sinatra, there was Franz Liszt.

He was not quite history’s First Rock Star. Several before him, including Alessandro Rolla, John Field, Niccolò Paganini and the eighteenth century castrato legend Farinelli, might have laid equal claim to such an honour. But Liszt would certainly take things to a whole new level, lending his name to an astonishing pan-European craze of the 1840s: Lisztomania …

Although widely credited for putting the Russianness into nineteenth century Russian music, Mikhail Glinka was an unlikely standard bearer. According to one of his musical successors, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the aristocratic Glinka was “very much of his time, pettishly vain, intellectually underdeveloped, full of vanity and self-adoration…”

Shortly after marrying into one of Berlin’s most illustrious families, the German court painter Wilhelm Hensel paid creative tribute to his adopted clan. Entitled “The Wheel”, his 1829 pencil sketch depicts eight figures standing in circular formation around one central figure …

There were three distinct phases to Clara Schumann’s long and eventful life, each one shaped by an intense relationship with a talented but complicated man. Over her childhood and youth loomed the overbearing figure of her father, Friedrich Wieck, a strict pedagogue who would work his daughter like a galley slave at the vocation he had chosen for her …

When once asked what he did for a living and whether he still wrote music, the then fifty-something Franz Berwald replied with a wry smile, “no, I am not a composer, I am a glass blower.” He was not speaking in jest…

One of the main characters in George Sand’s 1846 novel, Lucrezia Floriani, is a Polish aristocrat named Prince Karol de Roswald who becomes the heroine’s lover. But for those personally acquainted with Sand – and with her own romantic partner of the past eight years …