Books like The lives of the great composers by Harold C. Schonberg

A biography of the musician Mozart.

Focuses on the childhood and early musical training of the eighteenth-century Baroque composer, George Frideric Handel.

Here is the start-to-finish history of the classical music business: its heroes, villains, lions, and legends. Controversial, polemical, and rich with inside information, this is a successor to Lebrecht's widely acclaimed The Maestro Myth, in which the author illuminated the hidden crisis in the conducting profession. In unfolding this current tale, the author has tracked down the first concert agent and the man who invented hype. He highlights the forces behind the career of megastar Luciano Pavarotti and exposes the double dealings of record master Walter Legge, the follies of Leonard Bernstein, and the networks of Isaac Stern. In revealing detail the author lays bare the poignant fate of classical music, an art that has sold its soul and lost control of its future.

Jan Swafford's biographies of Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and "fate's hammer," his ever-encroaching deafness. Throughout, Swafford offers insightful readings of Beethoven's key works. - Publisher.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning "New York Times" music critic provides anecdotal accounts of the lives and times of thirty-nine musical superstars--from the castrate to Pavarotti and Horowitz.