A comprehensive guide to classical music
Musical revolutionary, political exile, reluctant virtuoso, personal enigma: Frédéric Chopin was all of these things and more. Although famous across Europe by his early twenties, he was not a typical celebrity. Beneath a well-polished aristocratic charm lurked a somewhat detached and ironic man …
In the mid-1830s Hector Berlioz was short of funds.. He had just got married to an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson, after several years of amorous pursuit. Although Harriet had once taken the Parisian stage by storm with her Shakespeare interpretations …
Robert Schumann was a man divided. Handsome, charismatic and ebullient, he could also be morose, as well as painfully shy and inarticulate with strangers. A richly imaginative, innovative and occasionally rebellious artist, yet there remained a meek …
History has dealt a rather unkind hand to George Onslow. Largely unknown today, he was ranked as a first-rate composer in his day and many of Europe’s finest talked about him in the same breath as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. His music was published widely and internationally, and he was showered with almost every possible public honour …
It is hard to overstate the achievements of Louise Farrenc. Aside from being the first woman to write a symphony, she was a fine concert pianist, an important musicologist and influential educator. Living through a particularly misogynistic time in French history, she managed to gain a professorship at the male-dominated Paris Conservatoire …
If the gods had ever decreed that all composers should die at twenty, then Felix Mendelssohn would now be regarded as the greatest of them all. No other teenage composer has ever equalled the undisputed masterworks that Felix created in his adolescent years …
Never before had the world seen anything like Niccolò Paganini. Half performing genius and half freak show, his impact on 1830s Europe was so immense that he became something of a legend in his own lifetime …
If you ever wanted to make a powerful study of gender inequality in 19th century music – and its practical and psychological effects on talented, creative women – then Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel would be a pretty good place to start …
Berlioz was a born iconoclast. Even in his student days, he showed little deference towards the canons of musical history. He thought nothing of profaning such names as Palestrina (harmonically unadventurous and overrated) or JS Bach (an oversized schoolmaster) …
When Rossini first announced himself on the Italian operatic scene, he was widely seen as a creative breath of fresh air. His early operas were a “genuine thunderbolt out of a clear, blue sky” according to French biographer and novelist Stendahl …