The lives and times of the great composers (Rev. ed.)

Explore the life of Bach, the respectable burgher much of whose vast output was composed amidst petty turf disputes in Lutheran Leipzig; the ugly, argumentative Beethoven in French-occupied Vienna, obsessed by his laundry; Mozart, the over-exploited infant prodigy whose untimely death was shrouded in rumour.

Steen gives us the story of Verdi, who composed against the background of the Italian Risorgimento; 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-siècle Vienna, a cultural capital bent on destroying Mahler ... and much more.