Author: David Hackett

Gaetano Donizetti used to say that his early life emerged out of darkness. Not least there was the windowless basement apartment, located just outside Bergamo in northern Italy, in which he had grown up. “My birth is covered in mystery for I was born …

In the popular imagination, Giuseppe Verdi was carved rough-hewn from the Italian soil, his destiny inseparably linked to that of his beloved homeland. With Italy occupied and partitioned by foreign powers for the first half of his life, he longed for a time when his country could be unified and independent once more …

Creating music came so naturally to the young Adolphe Adam that he had little inclination for studying technique or theory, or even for bothering how to read musical notation. “I loved music”, he recalled, “but I didn’t want to learn it. I would sit quietly for hours, listening to my father play the piano …

Given how much Robert Schumann loved the written word, it is surprising how relatively long it took him to embark on his major song settings. Some of it may have been down to an in-built snobbery towards vocal writing – he once asked a friend, “are you perhaps like me – someone who all his life has placed vocal compositions …

One of history’s unlikelier couples, Frédéric Chopin and George Sand were living proof that sometimes opposites really do attract. While he was reserved, sensitive, sickly, his personality somewhat shaped by old aristocratic codes, she was rebellious, ebullient, hedonistic and something of an iconoclast …

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 …