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Informationen zum Autor Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He was an organ scholar at Oxford, after the Royal College of Music and Eton. Since retirement from the City he has been chairman of the Royal College of Music Society and is chairman of the trustees of the Friends of the V&A Museum. He is the author of The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (Icon, 2004) Klappentext Enchantress of Nations is a lavish biography of Pauline Viardot, whose life spanned most of the nineteenth century; and it also weaves a rich tapestry of music and literature in France, England and Russia. We meet George Sand, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; Rossini, Berlioz, Chopin, and Charles Gounod, with whom Viardot had a stormy friendship; and especially the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, with whom she had a passionate40-year affair. Zusammenfassung A biography of the life - and the times - of the nineteenth century's Maria Callas. She was among 'the most brilliant dramatic stars of our time', according to Franz Liszt, and billed as 'the most talked of opera singer in Europe'. Dickens - reduced to tears by her singing - regarded her as 'one of the greatest actresses of any time'.
