Author: David Hackett

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 …

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 …