Author: David Hackett

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 …

Although most people outside of Denmark have probably never heard of Elverhøj, for most Danes the work is a part of their cultural DNA. A national pageant, commissioned by Frederik VI of Denmark in 1828, it was a great hit in its day, and has rarely been out of favour since …

Love and suffering were always synonymous in Franz Schubert’s mind. He once admitted that he had spent most of his life, creative and otherwise, “torn between the greatest grief and the greatest love…Whenever I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing …

In the spring of 1826 Franz Schubert was experiencing a serious slump. He was in low spirits, short of money and most worryingly, struggling to write any music. In desperation he made one of his sporadic attempts to find steady employment, applying for a musical directorship at the …

Largely overlooked today, Maria Agate Szymanowska was one of the most celebrated concert pianists of 1820s Europe. A personable and charming woman, her impressive list of professional contacts reads like a Who’s Who of famous early nineteenth …

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony manages to do what no symphony had previously managed: to transcend musical boundaries. With its intricate psychological layers and allusive sidetracks, it is like a “construction of mirrors, reflecting and refracting the values, hopes, and fears of those who seek to understand and explain it,” according to Beethoven biographer, Nicholas Cook.

Felix Mendelssohn may well have been one of the most naturally gifted musicians who ever lived. As a young man, he wasn’t far short of astonishing. Aside from the striking preciousness of his youthful compositions (he was even younger than Mozart …

Franz Schubert had a habit of not finishing symphonies. In the last decade of his life alone, he started six and completed just one. The other five were left abandoned, sometimes mid-phrase, and in various states of dereliction – a sketched-out movement here, a few scribbled notes there …

It begins delicately enough: a unison C, reverberating softly across the strings, oboes, clarinets and bassoons. It swells to a forte before dissipating itself in a short fragment of melody. Silence, followed by a brief answering phrase in the violins. The whole passage repeats itself …