In this masterpiece of "program" music — a genre invented by the composer — an obsessed musician is overcome by increasingly bizarre visions of his lover. T

This lively book takes us back to the first performances of five famous musical compositions: Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607, Handel's Messiah in 1742, Beethoven's

An exploration of fantastic soundworlds in nineteenth-century France, providing a fresh aesthetic and compositional context for Berlioz and others.