From Mozart's fabulous legato that "flowed like oil" to Beethoven's oceanlike surge, from Clara Schumann's touch "sharp as a pencil sketch" to Rubinstein's volcanic and sensual playing, The Great Pianists brings to life the brilliant, stylish, and sometimes eccentric personalities, methods, and technical peculiarities of history's greatest pianists.Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author Harold C. Schonberg presents vivid accounts of the artists' performances, styles, and even their personal lives and quirky characteristics-- such as Mozart's intense competition with Clementi, Lizst's magnetic effect on women (when he played, ladies flung their jewels on stage), and Gottschalk's persistent nailbiting, which left the keys covered with blood. Including profiles of Horowitz and Van Cliburn, among others, and chapters detailing the playing and careers of such modern pianists as de Larrocha, Ashkenazy, Gilels, Gould, Brendel, Bolet, Gutierrez, and Watts, The Great Pianists is a comprehensive and fascinating look at legendary performers past and present.

The author of this work traces the consecutive line of composers from Monteverdi to the tonalists of the 1990s through a series of biographical chapters. Music is shown as a continually evolving art, with no geniuses, however great, escaping the influence of their predecessors. The great composers are presented as human beings who lived in and related to the real world. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, Mahler and others are included, their lives woven together in detail and anecdote. This new edition extends the book's coverage to later composers.

Third Edition

An updated and expanded edition of this perennial favorite, tracing the line of composers from Monteverdi to the tonalists of the 1990s.

In this new edition, Harold Schonberg offers music lovers a series of fascinating biographical chapters. Music, the author contends, is a continually evolving art, and all geniuses, unique as they are, were influenced by their predecessors. Schonberg discusses the lives and works of the foremost figures in classical music, among them Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, the Schumanns, Copland, and Stravinsky, weaving a fabric rich in detail and anecdote. He also includes the creators of light music, such as Gilbert and Sullivan and the Strausses.

Schonberg has extended the volume's coverage to provide informative and clearly written descriptions of the later serialists such as Stockhausen and Carter, the iconoclastic John Cage, the individualistic Messiaen, minimalist composers, the new tonalists, and women composers of all eras, including Mendelssohn Hensel, Chaminade, Smyth, Beach, and Zwilich. Scattered throughout are many changes and additions reflecting musicological findings of the past fifteen years.

Harold C. Schonberg, senior New York Times music critic for twenty years, was the first in his field to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (1971). He is the author of many articles and eight books, including one on chess. Schonberg lives in New York City.

"A smooth, closely woven sequence of brief biographies . . . set in a surrounding continuum of depth and breadth which reflects the author's solid musical culture, his erudition, his command of socio-historic background, and his long experience in every kind and degree of performance."--New York Times