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Tchaikovsky declared that Mozart was 'full of divine beauty', and Schubert's wonder at the 'countless images of a brighter and better world' that Mozart was able to conjure up through his music knew no bounds. Many of us carry the image of Mozart as a transcendent genius, but what do we really know about his life and career, and indeed his music? This entertaining and informative biography takes us from Mozart's beginnings as a child prodigy to his greatest successes and cruellest setbacks.

Tchaikovsky is one of the most popular composers of all time. His melodies are known to many people who may never have heard his name. They crop up on mobile telephones, alarm clocks and answering machines as often as on records and concert programs. Like his music, the man himself was widely loved, but his inner life was fraught with sufferings, confusions and a deep vein of self-doubt. The drama of his emotional life is vividly reflected in his music, letters and diaries, all of which play a major part in this intimate portrait-in-sound.

The music of Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák is suffused with natural nobility, fluency and freshness, and embodies the spirit of his native land. This revealing biography portrays Dvořák as a complex and wide-ranging composer, and explores the creation and performance of his music as well as its reception on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing his art in all its richness and variety.

Polish by birth, Fryderyk Chopin made his name in post-Revolutionary Paris and is often depicted as the archetypal Romantic artist–blessed with extraordinary talent but consumed by the flame of genius, tormented by intense and tempestuous relationships and doomed to an early death. But how much of this story is based on fact? This account of Chopin’s life and times separates myth and reality and, illustrated with numerous musical examples, takes us from his youthful beginnings as ‘a second Mozart’ to the darkness and light of his life and the brilliance of his work.

In this audio biography, Gustav Mahler's life story is told against the backdrop of an age full of tension–colourful and polyphonic, faithful to the facts, and close to the sources.

Franz Schubert was regarded chiefly as a composer of domestic music, and during his all-too-brief life managed to publish only a quarter of his works. Without patronage and without ever becoming well known or a virtuoso, how did Schubert manage to achieve unprecedented expressivity in song composition, or to create his chamber, symphonic and piano masterpieces? And how did he reconcile the warring elements of his tempestuous personality?

Erstmals widmet sich die erfolgreiche Reihe der BR-KLASSIK-Hörbiografien einem Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts: Dmitri Schostakowitsch. Seine Symphonien sind nach wie vor Highlights im Konzertsaal, sein Schicksal inspiriert großartige Romane. Doch was weiß man von seinem Leben wirklich? Er ließ sich nicht gern in die Karten schauen. Und er hatte Grund dafür...

Is there any music more instantly recognizable and beautifully scored than Tchaikovsky’s wildly popular ballet Swan Lake? These and other works have become enduring classics, yet they were not uncontroversial in Tchaikovsky’s day, and there are those that still wonder if his style is fundamentally European or ardently Russian. Find out more about Tchaikovsky’s childhood obsession with music, his turbulent relationships with friends and colleagues, and how he overcame the deepest of personal crises to transcend all with an ambition that has left us with some of the greatest music ever written.

Claude Debussy is regarded by many as the quintessential French composer, with music that invited both warm applause and frosty criticism in his day. While our ears no longer hear him as controversial, his works heralded the dawn of an artistic period founded on innovation and experiment, and a desire to break with the past in search of new expressive means. With never a dull moment, Debussy went from being a musical misfit at the Paris Conservatoire to bohemian life amongst the Symbolist poets and some scandalous love affairs.

Dass in Franz Schubert, der aus seiner Geburtsstadt Wien nie weit hinauskam, gleichwohl die Sehnsucht nach der Ferne schlummerte, zeigen etliche seiner Kompositionen, die das Wandern besingen, die Natur im Lauf der Jahreszeiten ausdeuten. Im Geiste der Romantik sind dabei Trennung, Einsamkeit und Todesgedanken stets unterschwellig präsent.

Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and Water Music, two of his greatest orchestral achievements, have become synonymous with mid-18th-century England and with the pomp, ceremony and tradition of British royalty. But is this music necessarily synonymous with Handel? Where did his eclecticism and experimentalism come from? How and why did he conquer the emerging genre of the English oratorio and what were the circumstances that allowed him to become one of opera’s greatest composers?

Bach ist ein Zentralgestirn der Musikgeschichte. Manche verehren ihn gar als den "Lieben Gott der Musik". Aber auch der Schöpfer der Matthäus-Passion war ein Mensch wie jeder andere, und sein Leben verlief nicht immer harmonisch. Die neue Hörbiografie erzählt seine ganze Geschichte.

Symphonies, quartets, concertos and keyboard works poured from the pen of Joseph Haydn, making him one of the most important figures in classical music. Jeremy Siepmann tells the story of the man and his work in this lively autobiography, enhanced by numerous examples of the music itself, taken from the Naxos catalogue. There is no better programme with which to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer's death.

The first volume of Famous Composers, written by Darren Henley and read by Marin Alsop, the American conductor, won a prestigious Audie in the US. Here, Henley and the Naxos AudioBooks team bring the combination of an entertaining but informative "life" and numerous musical selections to a further set of six composers.

For many people, Beethoven is the greatest composer who ever lived. In this portrait-in-sound, actors' readings combine with his music to reveal a titanic personality, vulnerable and belligerent, comic and tragic, and above all, heroic.

Frédéric Chopin is the pianist-composer par excellence. 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 Great Gate of Kiev resounds to the tumultuous bell rings that end Pictures an an Exhibition, one of the most magnificent and virtuosic of all piano pieces. However, to some of his contemporaries, Modest Mussorgsky was ‘insane’ and ‘a perfect idiot’. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, what drove this tormented man and why did he suffer psychological breakdowns and alcoholism? How did he achieve his command of the realist idiom in his stage works? d, of course, Pictures at an Exhibition.

Following its audio biographies of Mahler, Wagner and Verdi, BR-KLASSIK now presents the fourth in the series: an audio biography of Richard Strauss, to coincide with the Strauss anniversary year of 2014. In operas such as "Elektra" and "Salome", the Munich-born composer made masterly use of established traditions, placing them brilliantly into new contexts and also pointing the way ahead especially where musical theatre was concerned.

Giuseppe Verdi, the son of an innkeeper from a poor village in the Po Valley, was a "self-made man". At the age of 26 he produced his first opera at La Scala in Milan, at 35 he became a landowner, and at 48 he was a member of parliament. This audio biography describes Verdi's life in the exciting worlds of the stage, agriculture, music and politics.

Robert Schumann's music reveals his eccentric, unstable and vulnerable character from childhood onwards, but also his sharp, highly developed mind and deep emotions. Schumann's "inner voice" is indeed the focal point of all musical romanticism.