All to play for

Impressed by Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (1965), which describes the close relations between Benjamin Haydon, the Carlyles and the Brownings in the summer of 1846, Hugh Macdonald has written a similarly ‘horizontal’ and highly readable biography of intersecting musicians in 1853.

His theme is the relations, not always close, between Brahms, Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner and a host of lesser figures in that year. As he says, a number of other years would have qualified for such a microscope, but this particular one saw all these principals meeting at an unusually charged moment: the birth of a major argument between the adherents of the ‘new’ style of Liszt and Wagner as compared with the more traditional compositions of Brahms. It was one of those crossroads, often repeated in artistic life, when everyone seemed to be spoiling for a fight about points of principle, and were just waiting to be insulted.