Swooning: A Classical Music Guide to Life, Love, Lust and Other Follies (Unabridged‪)‬

A whimsical guide to the conduct of a romance interwoven with the history of classical music, which is, surprisingly, not as nice as you might think ...

The history of classical music is littered with murder, sado-masochism, adultery, bigamy, fraud, riches, poverty, nervous breakdowns, bizarre habits, gluttony and terrible, terrible toilet humour (Mozart was the prime exponent of the latter). Classical music – nice? Not at all. It’s the most immediate expression of mental and emotional extremes: often deceptive, sometimes dangerous and frequently a discomforting revelation.

Just as the unsuspecting listener makes the connections between classical music and certain states of mind, so Swooning documents the all too human flaws in the lives of the great composers by loosely following the sequence of emotions as experienced in a love affair – one that doesn’t work out, of course.

In this fully revised and updated 14th anniversary edition, Christopher Lawrence leads us through the listening experience, from anger and Beethoven to sadness and Tchaikovsky, triumph and Wagner and freedom and Mozart – it’s all here in this whimsical guide to the conduct of a romance, with some handy hints on how to make it more, well, harmonious.