Author: David Hackett

In the 1820s and 30s, Luigi Cherubini was the notoriously short-tempered, officious director of the Paris Conservatoire, an institution he ran with the rigour of a crack SAS unit. Punctuality, order and discipline were all sacrosanct to him. He once physically chased a young student, a certain Hector Berlioz …

There was little ideology behind Hummel’s art – he was not the sort to make sweeping political or philosophical statements. He would not tear up a dedication page in a fit of rage, offer short shrift to any performer who complained his music was too difficult to play, or throw hard-boiled eggs at …

In middle age, Beethoven’s musical ideas were growing ever more expansive – rather like his pianos, in fact. He had a way of getting through the latter with almost indecent haste. His old friend and protégé Ferdinand Ries noted Beethoven’s penchant for accidentally damaging …

When the celebrated French pianist and composer, Marie Kiené Bigot de Morogues, began to suffer serious health issues in her early thirties, there were whispers throughout Paris that it was sadly inevitable: that women were physically and temperamentally suspect and not designed to take on demanding …

The theatre was in Gioachino Rossini’s lifeblood. Born in the small Adriatic city of Pesaro, some of his earliest memories were of touring with his musician parents from town to town, as they sought work in local operatic productions. Rossini senior was a French horn player (and occasional abattoir inspector), while his …

John Field may well have been classical music’s first genuine rock-star. A world-famous pianist, he loved to perform in fashionable salons and glittering concert halls while relishing the money and adulation his fame brought him. Outside of performing venues, he devoted himself to a life of …

It is a measure of Franz Danzi’s versatility that music historians have never quite agreed upon his overriding legacy as a composer. Was he a master of chamber music, especially in the early evolution of the wind quintet? Or was he the all-important mentor of Carl Maria von Weber …

If you were measuring Johann Wilhelm Wilms’ current standing as a composer on a scale of one to ten, with one being “a little neglected” and ten “completely forgotten”, he would probably be about a nine. But had you lived in the Netherlands …

Despite his varied and successful career as a composer, pianist, concert administrator and one-time amanuensis to Ludwig van Beethoven, Ferdinand Ries seems to have spent a surprising amount of his time trying to avoid conscription into an invading army, usually a French one …

Weber was a man of many contradictions. He wrote the first German Romantic opera – indeed he practically invented the genre – and yet all of his training was in high European Classicism. He was near-sighted, consumptive and walked with a limp all of his life – Beethoven would …