The Steinway Collection: Paintings of Great Composers

Music lovers will delight in the beautiful color paintings and eloquent prose portraits in The Steinway Collection: Paintings of Great Composers. Chopin, Wagner, Liszt, Beethoven, Berlioz, Mozart, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Handel, and Schubert are among the composers celebrated in this historic book, which was originally printed in 1919 as an in-house publication of Steinway & Sons and has never before been released to the public.

The paintings by esteemed American artists and accompanying essays by the brilliant critic James Gibbons Huneker are intended, in Mr. Huneker?s words, to ?evoke musical visions; for music is visionary, notwithstanding its primal appeal to the ear.? An introduction by acclaimed broadcaster and writer David Dubal, Juilliard professor of piano literature, gives the book historical perspective.

Also included: The Raindrop Prelude, a painting by award-winning artist A. I. Keller, which depicts Chopin?s reaction, as legend goes, upon discovering that novelist George Sand and her children, with whom he lived while composing his Preludes, were indeed alive following a stormy trip. Other paintings in the book include: Wagner & Liszt and Beethoven and Nature, both by N. C. Wyeth, father of contemporary realist painter Andrew Wyeth, The Death of Mozart by award-winning artist Charles E. Chambers, and Rubenstein Plays for the Czar by F. Louis Mora.
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