The Loves of Great Composers: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Loves of Great Composers, credited to Gustav Kobbé, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Loves of Great Composers by Gustav Kobbé. Read in English by Peter Thomlinson Gustav Kobbe was a German/US music critic who worked at the time of Liszt and Wagner in particular, and was clearly in the Wagnerian rather than the Brahms camp. His unusual style of writing and his strongly romantic take on the loves of these seven composers makes for entertaining listening, even though his facts and opinions may differ from more academic writers and biographers of these composers. Each composer occupies a section or chapter, with Wagner getting the fuller account in terms of length. In fact Gustav Kobbe claims he knew Liszt and Wagner as well as Cosima Wagner - so this must be quite original and authoritative. The 19C period and its atmosphere is conveyed by Kobbe's unusual sentence construction and reads more like story telling rather than a written work. ( Peter Thomlinson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Loves of Great Composers
• Author credits: Gustav Kobbé
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 7
• Listed recording duration: 2:49:19

Track guide

1. 01 - Mozart and his Constance — 21:08
2. 02 - Beethoven and his — 19:43
3. 03 - Mendelssohn and his Cecile — 23:36
4. 04 - Chopin and the Countess Delphine Potocka — 21:51
5. 05 - The Schumanns:Robert and Clara — 19:47
6. 06 - Franz Liszt and his Carolyne — 23:53
7. 07 - Wagner and Cosima — 39:20

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.