The Lives and Times of the Great Composers
by Michael Steen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael SteenEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-12-09
ISBN: 0195222180
Number of pages: 992
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of The Lives and Times of the Great Composers
Book Review: Chock Full of Facts, Insights and Wit
Summary: 5 Stars
"[Mad King] Ludwig had been given Wagner's 100,000-word essay 'Opera and Drama' when he was thirteen years old. It was thus no wonder that the boy suffered from hallucinations.' - The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, pg. 474
There are startling, or new, or witty observations like this on practically every page of this meticulously researched 984-page book that chronicles the lives of the great composers and the times in which they lived. I have been reading such books for nigh on fifty years and yet I found something new and instructive frequently in this marvelously written book. Michael Steen studied at London's Royal College of Music but later made a career in the City. He writes in a graceful style that urges the reader on.
There are chapters devoted to individual composers (or groups such as 'Glinka and The Five') from Handel to Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten. Lesser composers are remarked upon in the many interesting digressions contained within the main chapters. One certainly gets a sense of the social and political ambiance of the times under discussion, and Steen makes an effort to draw connections between those events and the works written in their midst. There are many illustrations including maps, pictures of the composers and other musicians and other cultural figures of the times. There is something here for the neophyte as well as for the grizzled music history buff like me. Clearly great thought was given by the author and by Oxford University Press to the arrangement and presentation of the book and it could hardly be bettered.
An enthusiastic recommendation. (Even in spite of the few howlers like this one: When talking about Dvorák's sojourn in the US, Britisher Steen says the composer spent time in Spillville in 'Iowa, Massachusetts').
Scott Morrison
Summary of The Lives and Times of the Great Composers
A grand and panoramic biograhical history of the giants of classical music, The Lives and Times of Great Composers is a new, unique, and lovingly constructed modern reference--and a beguiling read which you will return to again and again.Interlinked yet self-contained, each chapter distills the life of one or more composers, set against the social, political, musical, and cultural background of the time. Read the story of Bach, the respectable burgher, much of whose vast output was composed amidst petty turf disputes in Luteran Leipzig; or the ugly, argumentative Beethoven, obsessed by his laundry; or Mozart, the over-exploited infant prodigy whose untimely death was shrouded in rumor; or the ghastly death of Donizetti and Smetana. 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.
Michael Steen paints a vivid portrait of the tumultuous times in which these brilliant, yet flawed, human beings labored--a tour of 350 years of European history. From Handel's London and the speculative financial frenzy of the "South Sea bubble"; to the courts of petty German princelings and the ornate and sleazy Dresden; to the astonishingly creative Vienna of Beethoven and Schubert; to the opera in 19th-century Paris and Bizet in the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune; to the Majorca of Chopin, to the Russia of Tchaikovsky and the Siege of Leningrad, just one of the many horrors which Shostakovich had to survive. We encounter, too, painters such as Renoir and Manet, literary figures like Zola, Proust, and Dostoyevsky, and religious leaders such as Pope Pius IX and Cardinal Newman. Great Composers paints in broad brushstrokes the culture of a continent far wider than music.
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