Author: David Hackett

Regarded by many as the greatest female composer of the nineteenth century, Emilie Mayer was also one of the most fortunate. Helped in no small part by a generous family inheritance, as well as a stoical aversion to marriage, she was able to carve out a life and career largely on her own terms. “She claimed music as her life’s calling,” …

In late nineteenth century France it was generally agreed that Charles Gounod was the living embodiment of French music. After that he divided opinion to a surprising degree. One half of the country thought him an operatic genius on a par with Verdi and Wagner. The other half considered him a conservative reactionary …

When he was twelve years old, Hector Berlioz fell passionately in love with a girl six years his senior. Her name was Estelle – “tall, graceful, with large, grave, questioning eyes that yet could smile,” he fondly recalled, “hair worthy to ornament the helmet of Achilles, and feet – I will not say Andalusian, but pure Parisian …

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 …