Joseph Haydn: His Life and Works

The Life and Works of Beethoven

• ORIGINAL (4 hrs and 56 mins)
• By Jeremy Siepmann
• Narrated By Jeremy Siepmann, Bob Peck, Neville Jason, and others

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, both vulnerable and belligerent, comic and tragic, and above all heroic, as he comes to grips with perhaps the greatest disability a musician can suffer. No man’s music is more universal; few men’s lives are more inspiring. In every sense but one - his modest height - he was a giant. The great bonus of this audio-biography is that the development of Beethoven’s music can be heard in the context of his life.

The Life and Works of Mozart

• ORIGINAL (4 hrs and 52 mins)
• By Jeremy Siepmann
• Narrated By Jeremy Siepmann, Nicholas Boulton, Edward de Souza, and others

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the most astonishing child prodigy in the history of music, is felt by many people to be the greatest composer who ever lived. Dominated and shaped by a highly intelligent but frustrated and ambitious father, his story sees the development of a unique genius, from precocious and often endearing childhood to liberated fulfillment, unexpected poverty, and a tragically early death. Generously illustrated by Mozart’s music, from his fifth to his final year, this portrait-in-sound reveals a fascinating yet elusive character, drawing richly on the words of the composer himself and those who knew him.

Life & Works - Franz Schubert

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 30 mins)
• By Jeremy Siepmann
• Narrated By Jeremy Siepmann, Tom George, Peter Yapp, and others

The life of Franz Schubert has been a gift to romantically inclined biographers: the beautiful, brilliant, modest boy who sprang to fully fledged genius at the age of sixteen; the quintessential ‘artist in a garret’, entirely consumed by his art and living a hand-to-mouth existence in Vienna (home of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven); the gentle, cheerful, convivial young man who prized friendship almost as highly as music itself; the unworldly poet from whom great music poured like water from a fountain; the unrecognized master who died almost penniless at the age of 31.

The History of Classical Music

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 12 mins)
• By Richard Fawkes
• Narrated By Robert Powell

From Gregorian Chant to Henryk Gorecki, the first living classical composer to get into the pop album charts, here is the fascinating story of over a thousand years of Western classical music and the composers who have sought to express in music the deepest of human feelings and emotions.

Also available: The History of Opera.

The Life and Works of Bach

• ORIGINAL (4 hrs and 37 mins)
• By Jeremy Siepmann
• Narrated By Jeremy Siepmann, John Shrapnel, Trevor Nichols, and others

Although now beloved and revered by millions as the greatest composer who ever lived, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was best known in his lifetime as an organist, and was eclipsed in fame as a composer by two of his twenty children. For the last twenty-seven years of his life he was a schoolteacher and choir director whose duties extended to meal supervision and dormitory inspection. Yet throughout his career he composed a vast body of music which is amongst the most joyful, dancing and enrapturing ever written.