Among the Great Masters of Music: Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians

This gem from around 1900 offers something modern music biographies rarely provide: intimacy. Walter Rowlands was not interested in dry chronology but in the flesh-and-blood humans behind the compositions we now treat as sacred monuments. Here we encounter Beethoven raging against his deafness, Liszt conjuring storms with his piano, Wagner burning through scandalous affairs, Chopin wasting away in exile. The twenty-one profiles move from St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, through to the great Romantics, each rendered with the narrative verve of a storyteller rather than a scholar. Sixteen reproductions of period paintings lend ghostly presence to figures we've only ever heard as names. What endures is the Victorian conviction that these masters were not gods but mortals who bled, struggled, and transcended. For readers who want to know the humans behind the-hymns-to-joy, this vintage portrait gallery remains unexpectedly alive.