The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2

What happens when genius meets desire? Rupert Hughes's Volume 2 traces the combustible intersection of artistic creation and romantic passion across the lives of music's most legendary figures. Here is Franz Liszt, the adolescent who fell impossibly into love with Caroline de Saint-Criq, a doomed affair that would echo through his compositions for decades. Here too are Chopin and the fierce George Sand, Wagner's catastrophic marriages, Paganini's legendary obsession, and the surprising domesticity of Stradivari, married at seventeen to a widow ten years his senior. Hughes writes with verve and psychological nuance, arguing that for these men the fire of love and the fire of creation were inseparable, that the heart's turbulence fed the soul's genius. This is biography as it should be: vivid, unsanitized, alive with the recognition that the men who gave us music were as broken and brilliant in love as they were at the piano.