Michael’s other books
Michael Steen’s previous books that you may be interested in are below – click on the covers to see more and buy:
The Lives and Times of the Great Composers
Michael Steen’s portait of the biggest names in classical music, as well as being an authoritative reference, is an engrossing and hugely readable history of 350 years of musical genius at the heart of tumultuous Europe.
Explore the life of Bach, the respectable burgher much of whose vast output was composed amidst petty turf disputes in Lutheran Leipzig; the ugly, argumentative Beethoven in French-occupied Vienna, obsessed by his laundry; Mozart, the over-exploited infant prodigy whose untimely death was shrouded in rumour.
Steen gives us the story of Verdi, who composed against the background of the Italian Risorgimento; 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-siècle Vienna, a cultural capital bent on destroying Mahler … and much more.
’Michael Steen’s beautifully illustrated book packs an astonishing amount of biographical and cultural detail into nearly 40 subjects, starting with Handel and running through to Britten, with a cautionary word on history’s assessment of greatness. The chapter on Schumann is heartbreaking.’ Independent on Sunday
’Steen sketches his canonic figures with Dickensian flair, providing a bona fide cross-over title that is also a literary achievement in its own right.’ Times Literary Supplement
Order your copy – physical or electronic – here. Choose from ‘Deliver to’ Or Click on ‘Read on any device’
Enchantress of Nations
She was among ‘the most brilliant dramatic stars of our time’, according to Franz Liszt, and billed as ‘the most talked of opera singer in Europe’. Dickens – reduced to tears by her singing – regarded her as ‘one of the greatest actresses of any time’. Liszt also declared that, with Pauline Viardot, the world had finally found a female composer of genius.
Enchantress of Nations is a lavish biography of this amazing woman, whose life spanned most of the nineteenth century, and it also weaves a rich tapestry of music and literature in France, England and Russia. Michael Steen sympathetically and sensitively explores the passionate 40-year love-affair between Viardot and Ivan Turgenev, the great Russian novelist, as well as her stormy friendship with Charles Gounod, the famous French composer. We also meet George Sand, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; Rossini, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Fauré and the other Paris-based composers, artists and singers of the period.
Steen recounts the back-stage bitchiness, robbery, duels and violence of Viardot’s life and times. Among much else, we read of the unhappiness experienced by the progeny of successful parents – the life of Viardot’s eldest child was blighted by a catalogue of miseries. The scene is historical; many of the issues are surprisingly contemporary.
Enchantress of Nations is a portrait of one of the history of music’s most magnetic, colourful and brilliant female stars – but also a picturesque biography of tumultuous, artistic, ever-changing nineteenth century Europe.