The Loves Of Great Composers (1905)

The Loves of Great Composers is a popular biographical work by Gustav Kobbé, the American music critic and writer who lived from 1857 to 1918. The book was published in 1905 and belongs to Kobbé’s substantial body of popular writing on music aimed at general readers rather than at professional musicians or musicologists.

The book takes the romantic relationships of various major European composers as its organizing principle, with separate chapters devoted to the love affairs and marriages of figures including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, and others. The format gave Kobbé the opportunity to present biographical material about the major composers in a form that would appeal to the substantial popular audience for music that had developed in early twentieth century America with the expansion of orchestras and the establishment of major American opera houses.

Kobbé was a serious working music critic alongside his popular writing, and the book combines the kind of romantic biographical material that a general audience would expect with reasonably accurate musical and historical information about the composers themselves. The treatment of figures like Schumann and his wife Clara, or Wagner and Cosima, or Chopin and George Sand, draws on the substantial nineteenth century biographical literature about these famous musical couples and presents the material in an accessible popular form.

The book reflects the assumptions of early twentieth century popular music writing about composers and their personal lives. There is considerable romantic mythologization of various relationships, and some of the conclusions Kobbé draws about the connections between particular pieces of music and particular romantic episodes in the composers’ lives would now be considered overstated by professional musicologists. But the book is a useful document of how popular American audiences were learning to understand the major European composers during the formative period of American musical life.

The book runs about three hundred pages and is best read by selecting individual composers as they come up in personal interest or in performance schedules. It pairs naturally with Kobbé’s larger works on opera.