Joseph Haydn: His Life and Works

The Life and Works of Beethoven

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 58 mins)
• By Jeremy Siepmann
• Narrated By Jeremy Siepmann

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.

The Life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Musical Biography

• UNABRIDGED (3 hrs and 38 mins)
• By Perry Keenlyside
• Narrated By Nigel Anthony, Paul Rhys

This is the poignant and compelling story of perhaps the most naturally gifted musical genius of all time. Copiously illustrated with examples of his music, it tells of Mozart's extraordinary childhood travelling the courts of Europe, and of how, after a brief period of fame in Vienna, his fortunes declined until his early death and last resting place in a pauper's grave.

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 Life and Works of Chopin

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 57 mins)
• By Jeremy Siepmann
• Narrated By Jeremy Siepmann

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 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.