Michael Steen's Great Composers was originally published in 2003. A lifetime's work and almost 1000 pages long, it has since become the reference point and key read on the biographical backgrounds to classical music's biggest names.
Authoritative and hugely detailed - but nonetheless a joy to read - this new edition will expand its readership further.
Explore the story of Bach, the respectable burgher much of whose vast output was composed amidst petty turf disputes in Lutheran Leipzig; or the ugly, argumentative Beethoven in French-occupied Vienna, obsessed by his laundry; or Mozart, the over-exploited infant prodigy whose untimely death was shrouded in rumour. Read about Verdi, who composed against the background of the Italian Risorgimento; or about the family life of the Wagners; and Brahms, who rose from the slums of Hamburg to become a devotee of beer and coffee in fin-de-siecle Vienna, a cultural capital bent on destroying Mahler...and much, much more.
