The Loves Of Great Composers (1905)
- Downloads
- Under 100
- First published
- 1905
- Pages
- 100
Listen to The Loves Of Great Composers (1905) Audiobook Free
-
Mozart and his Constance
21:08 -
Beethoven and his "Immortal Beloved"
19:44 -
Mendelssohn and his Cecile
23:36 -
Chopin and the Countess Delphine Potocka
21:51 -
The Schumanns:Robert and Clara
19:47 -
Franz Liszt and his Carolyne
23:53 -
Wagner and Cosima
39:20
This audiobook recording is in the public domain.
The audio edition streams in the page. There is no audio file to download.
About this book
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.
Contents
About the author
More from this genre
See all
Books like this one
Discussion
No comments yet. Share a thought, a question or a favourite passage.
Copyright concern? Read our DMCA policy
Read or download
Public domain book This work is in the public domain and free of copyright. Anyone may read, download and share it.
- EPUB 1.0 MB
-
KINDLE Send to Kindle Send
- Download the EPUB file to this device.
- Open Amazon's Send to Kindle page, sign in, and add the file. Open Send to Kindle (opens in a new tab)
On a phone: open the downloaded EPUB and share it to the Kindle app.
You can also email the file to your Kindle address (it ends in @kindle.com) from an email address you approved in your Amazon account.
- PDF 1.8 MB
Downloads start right away. How to open EPUB on your phone
Book facts
- Author
- Gustav Kobbe
- First published
- 1905
- Reading time
- About 110 minutes
- Pages
- 100
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Music Theory
- Formats
- PDF, EPUB, Read online, Audiobook
- Audio read by
- Peter Thomlinson (1940-2022)