Any lover of classical music might want to buy this book.

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	• The Lives and Times of the Great Composers Michael Steen Oxford University Press, USA, 2004 - 992 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Any lover of classical music might want to buy this book.

I am not a professional musicologist, just a passionate amateur. I read a lot of musical biography and such, so I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much I learned from this book. It is a real joy to read, the sort of book one doesn't want to end. In my view, it is generally balanced and fair (though the chapters on Wagner and R. Strauss come close to assassination at times). Rather like Edward Gibbon, Steen lives out his sex life in his footnotes, which are often hilarious. The book is elaborately, even tediously, documented; but the source notes are in the back, so as not to distract from the text notes. This is not a book on music; it is a book on composers: biography not musicology. (As Steen explains in a humorous introduction, music is about cellos, biography about fellows.)

I really enjoyed this book and recommend it highly. At the risk of sounding petty, I wish that so distinguished publisher as Oxford could have employed an editor to rid this otherwise fine work of numerous grammatical errors. But put down your red pen for a while and just have a good time with Steen's exploration of Western music.

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CHACUN A SON GOUT

I have not yet read the whole book, since I don't think it particularly lends itself to this kind of reading; but I read the chapter on Mahler very carefully, since I have read all books on him (including the multivolume LaGrange's); as well as evaluating the book on this chapter (perhaps not fair, but I felt to publish my preliminary caveats anyway)

I found the book very interesting but there are enough caveats that I recommend one either see whether the book satisfies you by looking at parts of it first, or be prepared to return it.

General faults, in my opinion, are:
(1) There are many places where statements have no relation to what is being discussed.
Example: On page 747, there is a six-line paragraph which states in the beginning the relationship of Hugo Wolf and Mahler with the association of the former's songs to some of Mahler's works (very good; I learned an association I did not know.) Then on line 5 we learn that Wolf died of syphilis (what's the connection?). On the same (5th) line we learn that the two 'at times' slept in the same bed (!). and after a semicolon is stated "they often lived on cheese-parings" (no footnote explaining what this is, nor its relevance), and slept 'rough'. I also do not know what 'sleeping rough' means, or what is has to do with the disjointed statements--all in six lines!

(2) I did not notice, as found by another, any typos, but surely (page 761) 'The Tenth was completed (!) the following year . ." is not so.

(3) There are about 4500 (!) references at the back of the book indicating his profusion of listing practically anything and everything written about Mahler. There seems to be no selectivity in the quotes (and therefore the 4500 references.)

(4) Very frequently the profusion of numbered references seem to be just a thorough collection of any and all references to M.

(5) At the bottom of each page there are explanations with stars and daggers -- some of which have no relation to the text: On page 764 there is a starred footnote relative to the text statement of M's sailing to Europe. The note tells of a Dr. Crippen (never mentioned before or after) being arrested on the ship eight months earlier (!), and a statement of the Titanic sinking after M's death. !?!?!?

Summary: There is much of interest, whether 'more' or 'less' depending on the reader. There is no editing, little attempt in many places for one statement to follow the other ( = organization), and in many places I got the distinct impression that this was (to misquote Mr. Bush) 'no fact left behind'.

This is a good book; but it could have been edited and organized much better, which would have made for more pleasant reading.

You be the judge.

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This is a great book on great composers!

the Lives and Times of the Great Composers is a great book for what it sets out to accomplish!
It is a big book, wittily and well written which has given me and all who peruse its many pages hours of delight!
Steen begins his musical survey of Western music by beginning with Handel and Bach and ends with a chapter on English composers. In between he tells the biographies (too often tragic)
of such luminaries of the musical heaven as Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, Mahler, Richard Strauss,
Berlioz, Dvorak, Janacek, Sibelieus and several others.
What the book does not do is to analyze individual pieces composed by the composers discussed.
The book can be enjoyed by a general reader as well as classical music fan who wants to know:
1. Details of the biographies of the composeers
2. A knowledge of what the political and social mileu was in
which the artist worked. (For instance you will learn about what the London and Paris, Vienna and Berlin, Milan and Naples of Europe were like. You will learn European politics and go to several wars. You will know the daily schedules of the great
composrs. You will learn all about their love lives (often
sordid) in earthy prose. You will add to your cultural delight
in the immortal works of our Western civilization!
As one who reads several books on classical music each year this is one book I heartily recommend. It would be wonderful reading for students in a musical appreciation class or someone who wants to curl up with a wonderful book as the CD is playing
one of the works by the masters discussed in these many pages.
Money well spent for an outstanding book!

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Chock Full of Facts, Insights and Wit

"[Mad King] Ludwig had been given Wagner's 100,000-word essay 'Opera and Drama' when he was thirteen years old. It was thus no wonder that the boy suffered from hallucinations.' - The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, pg. 474

There are startling, or new, or witty observations like this on practically every page of this meticulously researched 984-page book that chronicles the lives of the great composers and the times in which they lived. I have been reading such books for nigh on fifty years and yet I found something new and instructive frequently in this marvelously written book. Michael Steen studied at London's Royal College of Music but later made a career in the City. He writes in a graceful style that urges the reader on.

There are chapters devoted to individual composers (or groups such as 'Glinka and The Five') from Handel to Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten. Lesser composers are remarked upon in the many interesting digressions contained within the main chapters. One certainly gets a sense of the social and political ambiance of the times under discussion, and Steen makes an effort to draw connections between those events and the works written in their midst. There are many illustrations including maps, pictures of the composers and other musicians and other cultural figures of the times. There is something here for the neophyte as well as for the grizzled music history buff like me. Clearly great thought was given by the author and by Oxford University Press to the arrangement and presentation of the book and it could hardly be bettered.

An enthusiastic recommendation. (Even in spite of the few howlers like this one: When talking about Dvorák's sojourn in the US, Britisher Steen says the composer spent time in Spillville in 'Iowa, Massachusetts').

Scott Morrison

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A grand and panoramic biograhical history of the giants of classical music, The Lives and Times of Great Composers is a new, unique, and lovingly constructed modern reference--and a beguiling read which you will return to again and again.
Interlinked yet self-contained, each chapter distills the life of one or more composers, set against the social, political, musical, and cultural background of the time. Read the story of Bach, the respectable burgher, much of whose vast output was composed amidst petty turf disputes in Luteran Leipzig; or the ugly, argumentative Beethoven, obsessed by his laundry; or Mozart, the over-exploited infant prodigy whose untimely death was shrouded in rumor; or the ghastly death of Donizetti and Smetana. Read about Verdi, who composed against the background of the Italian Risorgimento, or about 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-siecle Vienna, a cultural capital bent on destroying Mahler.
Michael Steen paints a vivid portrait of the tumultuous times in which these brilliant, yet flawed, human beings labored--a tour of 350 years of European history. From Handel's London and the speculative financial frenzy of the "South Sea bubble"; to the courts of petty German princelings and the ornate and sleazy Dresden; to the astonishingly creative Vienna of Beethoven and Schubert; to the opera in 19th-century Paris and Bizet in the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune; to the Majorca of Chopin, to the Russia of Tchaikovsky and the Siege of Leningrad, just one of the many horrors which Shostakovich had to survive. We encounter, too, painters such as Renoir and Manet, literary figures like Zola, Proust, and Dostoyevsky, and religious leaders such as Pope Pius IX and Cardinal Newman. Great Composers paints in broad brushstrokes the culture of a continent far wider than music.

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