Jeremy Siepmann

Fryderyk Chopin is the pianist-composer par excellence. Regarded as one of the most mesmeric performers of his day, he lives on in his music - his waltzes, mazurkas, études, preludes, nocturnes, three piano sonatas, two piano concertos and much more. Here, his life, from his birth in Poland, his famous affair with the French writer George Sand, and his death at the age of 49 in Paris, is told with his music featuring prominently.

The gentlest, the most loving, the most tormented of men, Robert Schumann gave to the world some of its richest and most individual music. There was scarcely a genre he didn't touch, and none in which he didn't leave something beautiful, memorable, or original. Best known for his piano music, his songs, his chamber works and his symphonies, he was also an epoch-making essayist and critic, who managed at a stroke, and almost single-handedly, to put...

Few composers have had a more bizarre start in life than Muzio Clementi. Few, too, could exceed his bad luck in having Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven for contemporaries. As a pianist, however (the forerunner of Chopin and Liszt, and renowned to this day as 'the father of modern pianism'), he was unrivalled. Nor did he confine himself to playing. He was a powerful publisher and piano manufacturer, and a teacher of unparalleled industry and influence....

Instruments of the orchestra, yes, but not just instruments in the orchestra. This is a set of portraits in depth, featuring individual instruments in many contexts (orchestral, chamber, folk, solo, operatic, cinematic, even jazz and avant-garde music) and in pieces from the Middle Ages to the present. Joining regular members are such exotic visitors as the eerie ondes martenot, the wind machine, banjos, bagpipes, coconuts, typewriters, six-shooters,...

One of the best loved composers of all time, Dvo?ák rose from rural origins to become not only a great but an influential composer. The first composer to put his native Bohemia on the musical map of the world, he was invited to do the same for America. One result was the famous 'New World' Symphony, which made him a household name across the globe. Writing music of irresistible colour, lilt and peasant vitality, he was also a melodist-in-a-million....

Although now beloved and revered by millions as the greatest composer who ever lived, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was best known in his lifetime as an organist, and was eclipsed in fame as a composer by two of his twenty children. For the last twenty-seven years of his life he was a schoolteacher and choir director whose duties extended to meal supervision and dormitory inspection. Yet throughout his career he composed a vast body of music...

No great composer's story is more predominantly happy than Haydn's, though even his has its share of clouds. A classic rags-to-riches tale, it sees him move from humble beginnings through decades as a liveried servant to his emergence as the most popular and successful composer of his time. One of the healthiest and least neurotic artists in musical history, he did more than any other single figure to pioneer the symphony, the piano sonata and the...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the most astonishing child prodigy in the history of music, is felt by many people to be the greatest composer who ever lived. Dominated and shaped by a highly intelligent but frustrated and ambitious father, his story sees the development of a unique genius, from precocious and often endearing childhood to liberated fulfilment, unexpected poverty, and a tragically early death. Generously illustrated by Mozart's music, from...

Brahms is one of the best loved yet most controversial of all the Romantics. Almost uniquely, his works have never suffered the slightest period of eclipse. Profoundly emotional yet governed by an iron discipline, the music, like the man, is a fascinating, entertaining, often deeply moving blend of opposites. He had a gift for friendship and a capacity for love far beyond the ordinary, yet no man could be ruder or more hurtful. Though humble, he was...

The life of Franz Liszt was as daring and spectacular as his music. Famed throughout Europe as the greatest pianist of the nineteenth century, he was one of the most original and prophetic composers who ever lived. Beautiful in youth, glowering in age, his high-profile love affairs were the talk of the town wherever he went and his generosity to young musicians was legendary.