The Solar Revolution (eBook)

One World. One Solution. Providing the Energy and Food for 10 Billion People.

Steve McKevitt

Tony Ryan

It’s an astonishing fact that capturing all the energy in just one hour’s worth of sunlight would enable us to meet the planet’s food and energy needs for an entire year.

The Solar Revolution tells the story of how scientists are working to reconnect us to the ‘solar economy’, harnessing the power of the sun to provide sustainable food and energy for a global population of 10 billion people: an achievement that would end our dependence on ‘fossilised sunshine’ in the form of coal, oil and gas and remake our connection with the soil that grows our food.

Steve McKevitt and Tony Ryan describe the human race’s complex relationship with the sun and take us back through history to see how our world became the place it is today – chemically, geologically, ecologically, climatically and economically – before moving on to the cutting-edge science and technology that will enable us to live happily in a sustainable future.

Steve McKevitt is an expert in communications and consumerism. Over a 25-year career his clients have included Nike, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Bank, Sony PlayStation, Harvey Nichols, Motorola, Universal, Virgin, BT and Atari. Steve is chairman of Golden, an ideas agency with clients in the UK, Europe and the USA, and also works as an advisor to national and regional UK government on employment, skills, business innovation and international trade.

Professor Tony Ryan OBE is a polymer chemist at the University of Sheffield. He delivered the 2002 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and regularly appears on Radio 4's Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox and Robin Ince, and has been on In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.

30-Second Quantum Theory (eBook)

The 50 most thought-provoking quantum concepts, each explained in half a minute

Brian Clegg

Frank Close Leon Clifford

The bestselling 30-Second… series takes a revolutionary approach to learning about those subjects you feel you should really understand.

Each title selects a popular topic and dissects it into the 50 most significant ideas at its heart. Each idea, no matter how complex, is explained in 300 words and one picture, all digestible in 30 seconds.

30-Second Quantum Theory tackles a mindbendingly mysterious area of physics, introducing the 50 most significant quantum quandaries and ideas. In a world where the quantum physics of electronics is an everyday essential and new quantum developments make headline news, you will visit Parallel Worlds, ride Wave Theory, and learn just enough to talk with certainty about Uncertainty Theory and to untangle the mysteries of quantum entanglement.

Brian Clegg is a science journalist and author whose numerous books include Inflight Science, The Universe Inside You, Introducing Infinity: A Graphic Guide, Dice World and The Quantum Age, all published by Icon. He also runs popularscience.co.uk

Wagner (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

No other composer is at once so revered or so reviled as Richard Wagner. Yet his contribution to opera is immense. His reputation rests on ten epic operas which are constantly performed worldwide, without speaking of the annual festival of his music at Bayreuth, the opera house which he designed and built to stage his works. Four of these operas, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, make up the monumental 15-hour Ring cycle, based on old Norse-Germanic sagas. Many of the others hark back to medieval and Arthurian legends, often dramatising the conflict between the sacred and profane, the sensual and spiritual. Using leitmotifs – themes which symbolise characters and elements in his opera – Wagner introduced a new musical vocabulary.

Endless affairs, twice married, constantly on the run for either political or financial reasons, a prolific writer, an indefatigable composer, Wagner was also, as Michael Steen's narrative shows, a monster of egoism. A revolutionary in his youth, Wagner escaped to Zurich, only to be forced to move on when the businessman bankrolling him was about to uncover Wagner's affair with his wife. He was then lavishly supported in Munich by the ‘Mad King’ Ludwig II of Bavaria, until the king's ministers objected. Once in Switzerland, Wagner was joined by Cosima von Bülow, Liszt's daughter and the wife of a conductor, who became his second wife and helped him realise his dream at Bayreuth.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Verdi (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

With Verdi, Italian opera reached its zenith, where music and drama are fused into an indissoluble whole. Although he wrote 28 operas, less than half remain regularly performed. Yet those which are remain a gold standard of characterisation, stagecraft and musical vocabulary. Rigoletto, La Traviata, Un Ballo in Maschera, Aïda – the roll call is long, but it is especially with his final two operas, Otello and Falstaff, that he becomes the unassailable master.

But it was not just the excellence of Verdi's artistry which propelled him to fame. Verdi was writing just as Italy was becoming increasingly resentful of Austria's domination, and there was a growing movement to unite the patchwork of territories of which Italy was composed at the time into a unified country. He became identified with the ambitions of reunification, and many of his operas, with their political subtexts, became rallying calls for the nationalists. Michael Steen unpicks how this most unsociable of men, a reluctant politician but a brilliant composer, became the figurehead for the birth of a nation.

Born into a modest background, Verdi, with his sound business sense, grew rich and famous; rich enough to ignore the scandalised disapproval of his neighbours at his living openly with his mistress for many years before marrying her. At his death 200,000 people lined the streets to bid farewell to their hero.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Tchaikovsky (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Unlike many of the composers in this series, Tchaikovsky showed no indication of genius as a child and he spent several years as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice before entering the St Petersburg Conservatoire. His composing career only really took off in his mid-30s. Late starter he may have been but, in the nearly twenty years left to him (he died at 53), he created some of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire: the operas, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and in ballet, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. The Fourth Symphony, with its fate motif, and the Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, along with his First Piano Concerto, make constant appearances on the concert platform.

Behind these achievements, as Michael Steen's gripping narrative shows, lay a life of anguish and sexual crisis as Tchaikovsky tried alternatively to accommodate and repress his homosexuality (then punishable by death in Russia). It led him to make a disastrous marriage at 37, which caused him much distress, and after only a few months, they arranged to live apart. In many ways his most successful relationship with a woman as an adult was with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, which lasted fourteen years, during which time they never spoke to each other in person. Even today, the true cause of his death remains open to question, with competing theories jostling for acceptance.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Schubert (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

In his short life of not quite 32 years – the briefest span of any first-rank composer – Schubert composed over 600 songs, showing a talent for word-setting which for many has never been equalled. However, while his songs gained gradual fame while he was alive, many of the works for which he is renowned were never performed in his lifetime, not even his Eighth Symphony, the Unfinished, or the Ninth Symphony, The Great C Major, which are so ubiquitous now. He was not lionised for the String Quintet in C, whose second movement Adagio remains one of the most requested pieces on Desert Island Discs. Nor did his exquisite quartets and piano music receive much recognition at the time.

Michael Steen evokes Schubert's youth as the son of an impoverished schoolteacher and his life among a boisterous, arty set of friends living it up in the dazzling gaiety of early 19th-century Vienna. Their evening gatherings for an intoxicating mix of politics, conversation and music became known as Schubertiads. At 25 Schubert contracted syphilis and was to suffer ill health for the rest of his life, falling into the depression that is so heart-rendingly expressed in some of his works. Schubert died only a year and a half after Beethoven, having been a torch-bearer at his funeral. Even so, he remained prodigiously productive and those last years bequeathed some of his finest works.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Puccini (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Puccini and Verdi are unquestionably the two giants of 19th-century Italian grand opera. Like Verdi, Puccini knew what his audience wanted, and supplied it – in Puccini's case, a highly coloured world of sweeping emotion, melodrama shot through with a kind of sadism. His three greatest operas, La Bohème – the most popular opera ever written – Tosca and Madama Butterfly are invariably staged every year, while Turandot, La fanciulla del West, Manon Lescaut, and Gianni Schicchi appear only scarcely less often.

Ever the hard-drinking, chain-smoking sportsman, Puccini had much of the raffish playboy about him. He bought himself fast cars, yachts named after the works whose proceeds financed them, and built a magnificent house at Torre del Largo where he continued his womanising under the jealous eye of his wife, Elvira. Michael Steen's narrative follows the progress of the small boy stealing the organ pipes of his village church on the rocky road to fame to become this larger-than-life figure.

Supported for several years by his publisher Ricordi, Puccini's first real hit was Manon Lescaut, heavily influenced by Massenet. Subsequent success saw him joining the jet set, and travelling to England and America, his star only eclipsed by the First World War. But his appeal remains clear and direct, as the director Jonathan Miller says: ‘I'm made to cry by Puccini and I never am by Verdi.’

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Mozart (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

In this ebook Steen describes the packed life of one of the greatest composers who ever lived, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his short life of almost 36 years, music poured from his pen. Symphonies, concertos, masses, chamber music tumbled out of him. By the age of fourteen he had already completed a staggering four operas, although it is for the later ones that he is revered as one of the greatest operatic composers ever. Yet the beauty of his instrumental music alone would have guaranteed his place in the pantheon of great composers.

Born in 1756, in Salzburg, Austria, he was, famously, the infant prodigy whose cash flow potential had to be maximised before he grew up and ceased to be a novelty. The relentless touring he undertook as a small child – Munich and Vienna, a three-and-a-half-year trip to Paris and London, and trips to Italy – gave way to an adulthood where he was endlessly seeking a job and patronage in a perpetual struggle to make ends meet. Steen traces Mozart's poignant progression through an age of back-biting courtiers when a composer could not hope to make his own way without bowing and scraping to the political elite, and his genius, incomprehensible as it may seem to us now, too often went unremarked.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Mendelssohn (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

That Mendelssohn was phenomenally gifted is beyond question. Born into a wealthy German Jewish family at the beginning of the 19th century, he was a boy prodigy of the piano, he wrote poetry, painted well, played several instruments, spoke several languages, and was an excellent athlete. At only sixteen he composed the celebrated Octet for Strings, one of the finest pieces in the chamber repertoire. He made friends with Goethe, whom he met as a boy of twelve when the poet was in his 70s, and at twenty was a prime mover in the revival of Bach's music to which we owe so much. Not only an inspiring conductor who did much to raise the standards of performance, he also wrote many works which found enduring fame: his Violin Concerto in E minor, his oratorio Elijah (particularly beloved of the English), his Italian Symphony, his 48 miniatures, Songs Without Words, and his incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, which contains the famous Wedding March.

Michael Steen follows Mendelssohn's progress from his cultured and cosmopolitan background to the years of relentless travelling (he went ten times to England and became friends with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert), and his directorship of music at Dusseldorf and at Leipzig – years that would see him exhaust himself until his early death just six months after the death of his adored sister, Fanny.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Mahler (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Mahler's brilliance as a conductor has never been in doubt. Tyrannical and difficult, he immeasurably improved standards of musical performance, and was partly responsible for revolutionising how operas are presented. But it is only relatively recently that his genius as a composer has come to the fore. His epic symphonies and the song symphony Das Lied von der Erde only really began to be enthusiastically appreciated after the Second World War, by audiences who could relate to the complicated and angst-ridden world they evoke.

Michael Steen traces the twists and turns of Mahler's life, lived out in the decaying Habsburg Empire with its constant rumbles of anti-Semitism. After a hard childhood, Mahler went to study in Vienna. Despite the disadvantage of his Jewish birth, he eventually secured top conducting positions, first in Hamburg, then in Vienna and New York. In the spare time of the career of a conductor as great and extensive as Toscanini himself, he succeeded in composing ten symphonies of immense range and reach. He also had an exceptional number of successful love affairs, although his marriage to Alma Schindler, ‘the most beautiful girl in Vienna’, and nearly twenty years younger than him, did not work out well. His struggles during the great years at the Imperial Opera, the climax of his conducting achievement, were compounded by the anti-Semitism prevalent in the prosperous, but superficial, fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Haydn (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Haydn's long life spanned the transition between the baroque and the classical. Though sometimes called the ‘father of the symphony’, in reality he elevated the genre to an unprecedented degree of sophistication; his 104 symphonies still enchant today. His contribution to the quartet was similarly immense; he transformed it into what was to become the most expressive form of Western instrumental composition. Of the 90 still extant, the great musicologist Hans Keller deemed 45 of them ‘absolutely flawless, consistently original master quartets’.

Haydn's vast output included opera (not much heard today), keyboard and chamber music, masses and two oratorios. Yet this amazing inventiveness was achieved, for the most part, in the 30 years he spent closeted away in the fabulously rich Esterhazy palace 30 miles outside Vienna. ‘There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original,’ he said later.

Michael Steen shows the young Haydn from his village beginnings becoming a chorister in Vienna, and his struggles when thrown on to the streets at seventeen, all played out against the backdrop of the glittering reign of Maria Theresa and the later upheavals of her son's reforms. From the relative security of the Esterházys' patronage, Haydn went on to become internationally famous, travelling twice to England. Friend to Mozart, teacher of Beethoven, Haydn died as Napoleon's troops rained down shells on Vienna.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Handel (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Born within ten days of Bach and within a distance of 100 miles, Handel could not provide a greater contrast with the Lutheran master. Where Bach made pilgrimages to hear church organists, Handel sought out opera in Italy. Where Bach was ‘parsimonious and prudent’, Handel, the Italian-trained extrovert, became a risk-taking entrepreneur on an international scale, ending his life a wealthy man, with a house in Mayfair, honoured by his adopted nation.

Michael Steen follows Handel from his early years in Hamburg, through his apprenticeship in Florence and Rome to his five decades spent in the bustling London of the early 18th century. Arriving in 1710, Handel plunged into the musical world of the capital, composing and mounting a stream of Italian operas – on average almost one every nine months during the 1720s – to universal acclaim. He set up his own opera company with royal support and went talent-hunting on the continent to bring back the best singers. When the fashion for Italian opera was finally overtaken, Handel reinvented himself as a composer of oratorios and found renewed success with audiences. Even today, annual performances of Messiah are embedded in this country's musical life, as are the coronation anthem Zadok the Priest, the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Three thousand people attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey when he died.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Chopin (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

‘After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.’ In his typically perverse way, Oscar Wilde puts his finger on the fact that no one can capture a mood quite like Chopin. Where Liszt dazzles with technical virtuosity, Chopin's music concentrates on nuance and expressive depth. His ballades, nocturnes, preludes and etudes, and even those pieces based on dance forms, the waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, belong essentially to the salon (it is reckoned Chopin gave no more than 30 public concerts in his life). Yet his predominantly solo piano works, full of harmonic invention and poetic power, are universally acknowledged as a pinnacle of the repertoire.

Frederic Chopin, though born in Poland, spent most of his adult life in France. Michael Steen follows his tragically short life from the early years in Warsaw and Vienna, to the Paris of the 1830s, the Paris of Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt and George Sand. Chopin's notorious affair with Sand, the outrageous free-thinking, trouser-wearing, smoking, female author, was a central feature of his life, but it ended bitterly. Strangled with tuberculosis, exhausted with coughing, he undertook a short visit to England and Scotland. Soon after returning to France, he finally yielded to the disease which had been gnawing away at him for so long.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Brahms (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

It was Schumann who first hailed Brahms as ‘the natural heir and successor to Beethoven’, and that is how many have seen him since, although to Brahms himself it was something of a burden. With his devotion to classical precepts, he proved himself a master of all the major forms bar one. His four symphonies, his concertos, his vast body of chamber music, where discipline underpins the wonderful romantic harmonies, remain central to the repertoire. During his own life, it was the rapturous reception of his German Requiem which established him beyond all doubt. The only form he never attempted was opera, which would have been ill-suited to his virtues as a composer.

Michael Steen shows how Brahms came to be raised up as the champion of traditional values against the new music of composers such as Liszt and Wagner, in one of the most bitterly fought controversies of the age. On tour as a young man from Hamburg, Brahms met the violin virtuoso Joachim, who introduced him to Schumann. During Schumann's period of insanity and especially after his death, Brahms developed a lifelong friendship with his widow, Clara. Steen chronicles his autumns teaching in Detmold, his passing loves, and eventual move to Vienna, where he would spend his winters, escaping to a variety of resorts to compose over the summer. He died at 63, still a bachelor.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Beethoven (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

In this ebook Steen traces Beethoven's tumultuous life, buffeted by the violent cross-currents of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars which convulsed Europe from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th. Born in Bonn, Beethoven became a successful musician patronised by the aristocracy. Though scornful of social convention, he conquered Vienna, creating works which rewrote the rulebook for all the musical forms he touched.

Irascible and argumentative, Beethoven was a troubled genius; frustrated by politics, exasperated by friends, foes, and family, and plagued by the gradual loss of his hearing which began when he was still in his 20s. While conflicts raged about him and within him, he constantly surprised people by doing the unexpected and staying fiercely independent. He was among the first to bring the piano to the fore rather than the harpsichord, as the larger sound could play along with the rest of the orchestra in a hall. Beethoven could always turn to his love of music even when ill-health led him to consider suicide, the wars devalued his earnings, and the love for his nephew Karl and the infamous ‘Immortal Beloved’ was never returned. Today he remains one of the world's best-loved composers.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

Bach (eBook)

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

Welcome to The Independent’s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.

Extracted from Michael Steen’s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent’s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.

Indisputably the greatest composer before Mozart, and for many, the greatest composer ever, Johann Sebastian Bach lived out his life in relative obscurity. It may seem incredible to us now, but during his own lifetime he was recognised primarily as an organ virtuoso, rather than a composer of genius. Fewer than a dozen of his compositions were published while he lived and, had not Mendelssohn started the revival of his music in the 19th century, his transcendently beautiful music might easily have been lost to us for ever.

At the end of each of his cantata scores, Bach appended the initials SDG: Soli Deo Gloria, to the Glory of God alone. For him ‘the aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul’. Michael Steen follows the profoundly religious Bach through his tough upbringing, to his years of growing fame, replaced by gradual neglect as different fashions overtook his music. Bach's progress as a jobbing musician through the world of small 18th-century German territories was frequently hard and he often found himself out of step with the authorities. Steen explains the background of petty squabbles and the crushing workload against which Bach was to compose polyphony which fused absolute mathematics and absolute poetry; in Wagner's words, ‘the most stupendous miracle in all music’.

Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. He is also the author of Short Guides to Great Operas, a series of concise, entertaining and easy to read ebooks about the world's best-known operas.

A Practical Guide to Productivity (eBook)

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Graham Allcott

To do: 

take the stress out of work
defeat ‘information overload’ 
be more efficient.  

Whether you are overwhelmed by your to-do list, or get stressed just looking at your full inbox, this Practical Guide from productivity expert Graham Allcott reveals how to think, and act, more productively and to start loving work.

Following a simple A-Z of expert tips and real-life examples, you will learn to improve your focus, regain control, and feel cool, calm and collected.

Graham Allcott is the author of How to be a Productivity Ninja and How to be a Study Ninja and the founder of Think Productive, one of the world’s leading productivity training companies. Think Productive’s diverse list of clients includes eBay, the British Library and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Ryder Cup (Paperback)

A History 1927 - 2014

Henry Lord

Peter Pugh

Played every two years, originally between Great Britain and Ireland and the USA and, since 1979, between Europe and the USA, The Ryder Cup is golf’s greatest tournament.

Peter Pugh and Henry Lord present the latest edition of their Cup history, telling stories that include the world’s most successful golfers – Walter Hagen, Henry Cotton, Gene Sarazen, Peter Alliss, Sam Snead, Max Faulkner, Ben Hogan, Dai Rees, Lee Trevino, Tony Jacklin, Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, Seve Ballesteros, Tiger Woods and Colin Montgomerie.

With photographs including Jacklin shaking hands with Nicklaus after the American had conceded a two-and-a half-foot putt to finalise a draw in 1969, this edition is published on the eve of September 2014’s match at the beautiful Gleneagles. Europe hold the trophy after their dramatic victory at Medinah Country Club, Chicago, in 2012.

The Ryder Cup – described as ‘well-researched … a historical but entertaining account of the Cup’ by National Club Golfer – is the essential companion.

Peter Pugh was educated at Oundle and Cambridge, where he was a member of the golf team. He has written many books on golf and golf clubs as well as about 50 company histories, including The Magic of a Name, a three-volume history of Rolls-Royce.

Henry Lord is the co-author of the highly acclaimed golf course coffee-table books, all published by Icon, Creating Classics, Masters of Design and St Andrews, which includes a Foreword from the great Ryder Cup player and captain, Seve Ballesteros.

Under Fire (eBook)

Fred Burton

Samuel M. Katz

Benghazi, Libya. 9/11/2012. Just over a year after the fall of Gaddafi, and on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a group of heavily armed Islamic terrorists had their sights set on the U.S. diplomatic and intelligence presence in the city.

In the prolonged attack, four Americans died, including the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, the Information Officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Based on confidential eyewitness sources within the intelligence, diplomatic, and military communities, Under Fire is the terrifying account of that night, and of a desperate last stand amid the chaos of rebellion.

Fred Burton is a former State Department counter terrorism deputy chief and one of the world's foremost experts on security, terrorists and terrorist organizations. He is the author of a bestselling memoir, Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, and Chasing Shadows: A Special Agent’s Hunt to Bring a Cold War Assassin to Justice (Palgrave, 2011). Samuel Katz is an internationally recognized expert on Middle East security issues, international terrorism, and military special operations and counter-terrorism.