From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart's singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether

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Explores the life and work of the prolific eighteenth-century Austrian composer who began life as a child prodigy, composing music at the age of five, and died a pauper at age thirty-five.

As he's done in Napoleon, Churchill, Jesus, and Darwin, acclaimed historian and author Paul Johnson here offers a concise, illuminating biography of Mozart. Johnson's focus is on the music-Mozart's wondrous output of composition and his uncanny gift for instrumentation. Liszt once said that Mozart composed more bars than a trained copyist could write in a lifetime. Mozart's gift and skill with instruments was also remarkable as he mastered all of...

Describes the life of eighteenth-century Austrian composer, Mozart, a musical prodigy who learned to write music before he could write letters and grew up to become Imperial Court Composer to Emperor Joseph.

Almost from the moment it was first set to paper, the music of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) - technically superb, rich in quality, and widely imitated - has exemplified the Classical style, creating not only the Classical-era symphony but setting the standard, through his own 68 string quartets, against which that form has ever after been judged. And yet Haydn, despite the influence left by more than 1,000 works, seems to no longer get his due,

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"Without Beethoven, music as we know it wouldn't exist. By examining one hundred of his compositions, a portrait emerges of the man behind the music. Lebrecht has immersed himself in the rich catalogue of Beethoven recordings and presents a unique picture of the man through his music. He selects the best recordings of one hundred key pieces, showing the composer as we've never seen him before. Who was the irascible, unpredictable, warped genius who...

". . . tells the story of Beethoven from 1778 to his first major public appearance in Vienna in 1795. It begins when the family is living a difficult life in Bonn. Father Johann battles with alcoholism and is deep in debt. Only young Ludwig and his talent at the piano offer any hope for the future--if only he would stop composing his own pieces and just play what's expected of him."--

An astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers. "In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative...