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The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,017
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The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (Hardcover)
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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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