Musical Lives

Robert Schumann had a difficult start as a composer. Denied any significant musical upbringing, he took a long time through indirect routes to establish himself as a major composer. Persistent illness also dogged his work. His final catastrophic mental collapse has combined with the autobiographical and secretive aspects of his music to cast for posterity a veil of ominous mystery over his entire life. Yet this is only one view. Schumann battled his personal demons and was acutely self-aware and organized. He transformed himself from a brilliant youthful fantasist in small forms into a composer of extended works in every genre. This book provides a new focus on Schumann as a practical working musician interacting with the professional world to develop his creative gifts to the full, and examines the central role of Clara Wieck Schumann in helping to bring this about.

Robert Schumann had a difficult start as a composer. Denied any significant musical upbringing, he took a long time through indirect routes to establish himself as a major composer. Persistent illness also dogged his work. His final catastrophic mental collapse has combined with the autobiographical and secretive aspects of his music to cast for posterity a veil of ominous mystery over his entire life. Yet this is only one view. Schumann battled his personal demons and was acutely self-aware and organized. He transformed himself from a brilliant youthful fantasist in small forms into a composer of extended works in every genre. This book provides a new focus on Schumann as a practical working musician interacting with the professional world to develop his creative gifts to the full, and examines the central role of Clara Wieck Schumann in helping to bring this about.

Presenting a fresh picture of the life and work of Joseph Haydn, this biography captures all the complexities and contradictions of the composer's long career. In his lifetime Haydn achieved a degree of fame that easily surpassed that of Mozart and Beethoven. Later his historical significance was more restricted, regarded exclusively as the composer who first recognised the potential of the symphony and the quartet. However, Haydn had also composed operas, oratorios and church music with similar enthusiasm and self-regard. Too easily buttonholed as a Viennese composer, he interacted consistently with the musical life of Vienna only during the earliest and latest periods of his life; London was at least as important in fashioning the composer's fame and legacy. To counter the genial view of the composer, this biography probes the darker side of Haydn's personality, his commercial opportunism and double dealing, his penny-pinching and his troubled marriage.

Olivier Messiaen stands as one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century and among the foremost religious artists of any era. When he died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a deepl

This important biography of Elgar draws on letters and documents which became available in the preceding twenty-five years. Michael Kennedy, a leading scholar of British music and a distinguished musical biographer, uses this material, which includes Elgar's own vast correspondence, in an attempt to get to the centre of the composer's complex personality. Elgar's letters reveal his unpredictable swings of mood, from gaiety and a fondness for puns to morose self-pity and a feeling that he was 'not wanted', and although much of Elgar's music sounds confident and coherent, it also has an underlying layer of unease, melancholy and insecurity. His relationships with his wife and other women friends are a continuing thread in the life of a man who remained acutely conscious of his lower middle-class origins in spite of his meteoric rise to fame, honours in Edward VII's reign and friendship with the King.

Like Shakespeare, J.S. Bach is known largely by his works. Peter Williams asks many questions in this examination of the man as well as the composer. What was Bach like as a youth, father, and, eventu

Like Shakespeare, J.S. Bach is known largely by his works. Peter Williams asks many questions in this examination of the man as well as the composer. What was Bach like as a youth, father, and, eventu

This biography of composer and pianist Felix Mendelssohn traces his development from musical child prodigy to a conductor whose influence as an advocate of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven is still felt to

Verdi's long life spanned Napoleonic rule and the age of broadcasting. In this new biography, John Rosselli considers a boldly innovative artist whose twenty-eight operas still speak to us. He investi

Verdi's long life spanned Napoleonic rule and the age of broadcasting. In this new biography, John Rosselli considers a boldly innovative artist whose twenty-eight operas still speak to us. He investi

Ives' life (1874-1955) spanned two centuries; he grew up in the nineteenth and composed chiefly in the twentieth. His nostalgia for a simpler life in the New England town of his youth is revealed in h

Richard Strauss' successful conducting and composing career spanned one of the most fascinating stretches of modern German history, from oil lamps to atomic energy, from a young empire to a divided Ge

Berlioz was arguably the greatest French composer of the nineteenth century. Although the author of the Symphonie fantastique was possessed of a fertile imagination and sometimes obsessed by love, the

An account of Beethoven's life as a creative musician.

This account of Beethoven reveals the life and times of a creative musician in Bonn and Vienna in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While paying due regard to the image of Beethoven

On 15 September, 1945 the composer Anton Webern was shot in confusing circumstances in a small mountain village near Salzburg, and the world lost a composer of extreme originality whose mature music was still almost unknown. When Webern's works did come to light he immediately became one of the most influential figures in music of the second half of this century. But the composer who was hailed as the originator of the hyperintellectualised serialism of the 1950s and 60s was by nature an ardent romantic who held feeling - and comprehensibility - to be important above all else in art. This book focuses on several aspects of Webern's life that have been treated only briefly in earlier accounts: his youthful instability, his often embarrassing dependence on Schoenberg, his naive nationalism and his absolute belief in the value of the brief moments of music he produced.

John Rosselli's reassessment of the life and work of Bellini.