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Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Puccini and Verdi are unquestionably the two giants of 19th-century Italian grand opera. Like Verdi, Puccini knew what his audience wanted, and supplied it – in Puccini's case, a highly coloured world of sweeping emotion, melodrama shot through with a kind of sadism. His three greatest operas, La Bohème – the most popular opera ever written – Tosca and Madama Butterfly are invariably staged every year, while Turandot, La fanciulla del West, Manon Lescaut, and Gianni Schicchi appear only scarcely less often.

Ever the hard-drinking, chain-smoking sportsman, Puccini had much of the raffish playboy about him. He bought himself fast cars, yachts named after the works whose proceeds financed them, and built a magnificent house at Torre del Largo where he continued his womanising under the jealous eye of his wife, Elvira. Michael Steen's narrative follows the progress of the small boy stealing the organ pipes of his village church on the rocky road to fame to become this larger-than-life figure.

Supported for several years by his publisher Ricordi, Puccini's first real hit was Manon Lescaut, heavily influenced by Massenet. Subsequent success saw him joining the jet set, and travelling to England and America, his star only eclipsed by the First World War. But his appeal remains clear and direct, as the director Jonathan Miller says: 'I'm made to cry by Puccini and I never am by Verdi.'

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The Great Composers

Puccini: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Unlike many of the composers in this series, Tchaikovsky showed no indication of genius as a child and he spent several years as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice before entering the St Petersburg Conservatoire. His composing career only really took off in his mid-30s. Late starter he may have been but, in the nearly twenty years left to him (he died at 53), he created some of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire: the operas, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and in ballet, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. The Fourth Symphony, with its fate motif, and the Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, along with his First Piano Concerto, make constant appearances on the concert platform.

Behind these achievements, as Michael Steen's gripping narrative shows, lay a life of anguish and sexual crisis as Tchaikovsky tried alternatively to accommodate and repress his homosexuality (then punishable by death in Russia). It led him to make a disastrous marriage at 37, which caused him much distress, and after only a few months, they arranged to live apart. In many ways his most successful relationship with a woman as an adult was with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, which lasted fourteen years, during which time they never spoke to each other in person. Even today, the true cause of his death remains open to question, with competing theories jostling for acceptance.

Tchaikovsky: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

With Verdi, Italian opera reached its zenith, where music and drama are fused into an indissoluble whole. Although he wrote 28 operas, less than half remain regularly performed. Yet those which are remain a gold standard of characterisation, stagecraft and musical vocabulary. Rigoletto, La Traviata, Un Ballo in Maschera, Aïda – the roll call is long, but it is especially with his final two operas, Otello and Falstaff, that he becomes the unassailable master.

But it was not just the excellence of Verdi's artistry which propelled him to fame. Verdi was writing just as Italy was becoming increasingly resentful of Austria's domination, and there was a growing movement to unite the patchwork of territories of which Italy was composed at the time into a unified country. He became identified with the ambitions of reunification, and many of his operas, with their political subtexts, became rallying calls for the nationalists. Michael Steen unpicks how this most unsociable of men, a reluctant politician but a brilliant composer, became the figurehead for the birth of a nation.

Born into a modest background, Verdi, with his sound business sense, grew rich and famous; rich enough to ignore the scandalised disapproval of his neighbours at his living openly with his mistress for many years before marrying her. At his death 200,000 people lined the streets to bid farewell to their hero.

Verdi: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

'After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.' In his typically perverse way, Oscar Wilde puts his finger on the fact that no one can capture a mood quite like Chopin. Where Liszt dazzles with technical virtuosity, Chopin's music concentrates on nuance and expressive depth. His ballades, nocturnes, preludes and etudes, and even those pieces based on dance forms, the waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, belong essentially to the salon (it is reckoned Chopin gave no more than 30 public concerts in his life). Yet his predominantly solo piano works, full of harmonic invention and poetic power, are universally acknowledged as a pinnacle of the repertoire.

Frederic Chopin, though born in Poland, spent most of his adult life in France. Michael Steen follows his tragically short life from the early years in Warsaw and Vienna, to the Paris of the 1830s, the Paris of Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt and George Sand. Chopin's notorious affair with Sand, the outrageous free-thinking, trouser-wearing, smoking, female author, was a central feature of his life, but it ended bitterly. Strangled with tuberculosis, exhausted with coughing, he undertook a short visit to England and Scotland. Soon after returning to France, he finally yielded to the disease which had been gnawing away at him for so long.

Chopin: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

In this ebook Steen traces Beethoven's tumultuous life, buffeted by the violent cross-currents of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars which convulsed Europe from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th. Born in Bonn, Beethoven became a successful musician patronised by the aristocracy. Though scornful of social convention, he conquered Vienna, creating works which rewrote the rulebook for all the musical forms he touched.

Irascible and argumentative, Beethoven was a troubled genius; frustrated by politics, exasperated by friends, foes, and family, and plagued by the gradual loss of his hearing which began when he was still in his 20s. While conflicts raged about him and within him, he constantly surprised people by doing the unexpected and staying fiercely independent. He was among the first to bring the piano to the fore rather than the harpsichord, as the larger sound could play along with the rest of the orchestra in a hall. Beethoven could always turn to his love of music even when ill-health led him to consider suicide, the wars devalued his earnings, and the love for his nephew Karl and the infamous 'Immortal Beloved' was never returned. Today he remains one of the world's best-loved composers.

Beethoven: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

In this ebook Steen describes the packed life of one of the greatest composers who ever lived, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his short life of almost 36 years, music poured from his pen. Symphonies, concertos, masses, chamber music tumbled out of him. By the age of fourteen he had already completed a staggering four operas, although it is for the later ones that he is revered as one of the greatest operatic composers ever. Yet the beauty of his instrumental music alone would have guaranteed his place in the pantheon of great composers.

Born in 1756, in Salzburg, Austria, he was, famously, the infant prodigy whose cash flow potential had to be maximised before he grew up and ceased to be a novelty. The relentless touring he undertook as a small child – Munich and Vienna, a three-and-a-half-year trip to Paris and London, and trips to Italy – gave way to an adulthood where he was endlessly seeking a job and patronage in a perpetual struggle to make ends meet. Steen traces Mozart's poignant progression through an age of back-biting courtiers when a composer could not hope to make his own way without bowing and scraping to the political elite, and his genius, incomprehensible as it may seem to us now, too often went unremarked.

Mozart: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

In his short life of not quite 32 years – the briefest span of any first-rank composer – Schubert composed over 600 songs, showing a talent for word-setting which for many has never been equalled. However, while his songs gained gradual fame while he was alive, many of the works for which he is renowned were never performed in his lifetime, not even his Eighth Symphony, the Unfinished, or the Ninth Symphony, The Great C Major, which are so ubiquitous now. He was not lionised for the String Quintet in C, whose second movement Adagio remains one of the most requested pieces on Desert Island Discs. Nor did his exquisite quartets and piano music receive much recognition at the time.

Michael Steen evokes Schubert's youth as the son of an impoverished schoolteacher and his life among a boisterous, arty set of friends living it up in the dazzling gaiety of early 19th-century Vienna. Their evening gatherings for an intoxicating mix of politics, conversation and music became known as Schubertiads. At 25 Schubert contracted syphilis and was to suffer ill health for the rest of his life, falling into the depression that is so heart-rendingly expressed in some of his works. Schubert died only a year and a half after Beethoven, having been a torch-bearer at his funeral. Even so, he remained prodigiously productive and those last years bequeathed some of his finest works.

Schubert: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Haydn's long life spanned the transition between the baroque and the classical. Though sometimes called the 'father of the symphony', in reality he elevated the genre to an unprecedented degree of sophistication; his 104 symphonies still enchant today. His contribution to the quartet was similarly immense; he transformed it into what was to become the most expressive form of Western instrumental composition. Of the 90 still extant, the great musicologist Hans Keller deemed 45 of them 'absolutely flawless, consistently original master quartets'.

Haydn's vast output included opera (not much heard today), keyboard and chamber music, masses and two oratorios. Yet this amazing inventiveness was achieved, for the most part, in the 30 years he spent closeted away in the fabulously rich Esterhazy palace 30 miles outside Vienna. 'There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original,' he said later.

Michael Steen shows the young Haydn from his village beginnings becoming a chorister in Vienna, and his struggles when thrown on to the streets at seventeen, all played out against the backdrop of the glittering reign of Maria Theresa and the later upheavals of her son's reforms. From the relative security of the Esterházys' patronage, Haydn went on to become internationally famous, travelling twice to England. Friend to Mozart, teacher of Beethoven, Haydn died as Napoleon's troops rained down shells on Vienna.

Haydn: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

It was Schumann who first hailed Brahms as 'the natural heir and successor to Beethoven', and that is how many have seen him since, although to Brahms himself it was something of a burden. With his devotion to classical precepts, he proved himself a master of all the major forms bar one. His four symphonies, his concertos, his vast body of chamber music, where discipline underpins the wonderful romantic harmonies, remain central to the repertoire. During his own life, it was the rapturous reception of his German Requiem which established him beyond all doubt. The only form he never attempted was opera, which would have been ill-suited to his virtues as a composer.

Michael Steen shows how Brahms came to be raised up as the champion of traditional values against the new music of composers such as Liszt and Wagner, in one of the most bitterly fought controversies of the age. On tour as a young man from Hamburg, Brahms met the violin virtuoso Joachim, who introduced him to Schumann. During Schumann's period of insanity and especially after his death, Brahms developed a lifelong friendship with his widow, Clara. Steen chronicles his autumns teaching in Detmold, his passing loves, and eventual move to Vienna, where he would spend his winters, escaping to a variety of resorts to compose over the summer. He died at 63, still a bachelor.

Brahms: The Great Composers

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Indisputably the greatest composer before Mozart, and for many, the greatest composer ever, Johann Sebastian Bach lived out his life in relative obscurity. It may seem incredible to us now, but during his own lifetime he was recognised primarily as an organ virtuoso, rather than a composer of genius. Fewer than a dozen of his compositions were published while he lived and, had not Mendelssohn started the revival of his music in the 19th century, his transcendently beautiful music might easily have been lost to us for ever.

At the end of each of his cantata scores, Bach appended the initials SDG: Soli Deo Gloria, to the Glory of God alone. For him 'the aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul'. Michael Steen follows the profoundly religious Bach through his tough upbringing, to his years of growing fame, replaced by gradual neglect as different fashions overtook his music. Bach's progress as a jobbing musician through the world of small 18th-century German territories was frequently hard and he often found himself out of step with the authorities. Steen explains the background of petty squabbles and the crushing workload against which Bach was to compose polyphony which fused absolute mathematics and absolute poetry; in Wagner's words, 'the most stupendous miracle in all music'.