1852: Emma’s Wedding Gift

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” …

1851: Giuseppe and the Jester

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 …

1849: Lisztomania

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 …

1848: The Acorn and the Oak

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…”

1846: Mother, Daughter, Genius

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 …