Discusses the life and career of the eighteenth-century German composer and organist.

Suchet illuminates the composer's difficult childhood, his struggle to maintain friendships and romances, his ungovernable temper, his obsessive efforts to control his nephew's life, and the excruciating decline of his hearing. This absorbing narrative provides a comprehensive account of a momentous life, as it takes the reader on a journey from the composer's birth in Bonn to his death in Vienna.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence....

"From one of Bach's greatest living interpreters, a landmark study which explains in ... detail how the composer worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects--and what it can tell us about Bach the man"--

Highlights the life and achievements of the eighteenth-century German composer and musician, and examines the development of his most important compositions.

Well over a century after Wagner's death, the man and his music are as controversial as ever. Praised for his profound insights into the workings of the human heart, he has also been condemned as a dangerous libertine, a proto-fascist and an arrogant bore. His vast four-part operatic Ring cycle has been elevated as one of the greatest achievements of western culture and dismissed as an unparalleled example of creative megalomania. No attempt is made...

Bach and the Bachs - Weimar and Cothen - Leipzig - Final years - Bach's music.

A biography of the nineteenth-century German composer with emphasis on his childhood and early musical training.